Marceline the College Queen: a Stakes Prequel (Adventure Time)
by J Stanton
Summary: Ever wondered how Marcy got stuck under that tree in the first episode of Stakes? Or, for that matter, why she was having an existential crisis about that same time? Find out in this fic about everyone's favorite vampire queen as she tries out college, has run-ins with a hero bent on killing her, makes romance and works out some things. I own no part of Adventure Time.
1. Cast of Characters

**Characters:  
**

 _ **(SPOILER WARNING: The following character sheet is usually up to**_ ** _date._ _This means that there's a spoiler on about every line. If you are new to this series, go ahead and hop over to chapter 1.)_**

 **Sir Marceline Vetiver Abadeer, the Vampire Queen:**

Everyone's favorite angsty vampire sorceress. Right now, she's trying out college to see if it suits her. She was born in Georgia in the late 80's to an elementary school teacher and a demon lord, right before the Eastern Bloc nuked the U.S. with an experimental bomb derived from radioactive ore found in a comet and about a thousand conventional neutron bombs. Rather than hitting D.C, the comet bomb hit her hometown for mysterious reasons and she survived while her mother died of radiation. For the last thousand years she's lived an active life, become a vampire and married a certain candy-based dictator not once but twice.

Her interests include music, film photography, literature and beating the crap out of people she doesn't like with axes, swords and blunt instruments. She's the current frontwoman of _The Thieves,_ a post-post-post-everything-rock band that has begun work on their first EP.

 **Sir Sue:**

Is she Marceline's girl or are they just friends? Who even knows? Dating is complicated. She's a warrior from a harsh, icy realm that used to be part of Canada, where warriors must earn their names in battle. In exile after the death of her lover, she named herself and found her way to a place that would teach her the secrets of life in exchange for her skill with a broadsword. That place was the Heroic Lyceum of the Holy Enchiridion.

Her interests include geomancy, geography, archaeology, birdwatching and photography, but her real love seems to be the university airplane. Recently she's put her musical talent to good use as the keyboardist in _The Thieves_ as well.

 **Princess Bonnibell Bette Bubblegum I, Princeps Confectionis:**

The long-lived fascist dictator of one of the more outlandish kingdoms near the Atlanta blast-zone. Apparently, she really is made of bubblegum. She doesn't appear a lot but Marcy has a _lot_ of unresolved issues from their two marriages and assorted brief flings.

 **Sir Simon "Ice King" Dmitrievich Petrikov, DPhil, PhD:**

Prewar Russian-Jewish-American archaeologist, antiquarian and linguist noted for his translations of the _Pnakotic Fragments_ , the _Unaussprechlichen Kulten_ of Von Junzt, and the _Hero's Enchiridion_. Highly influential member of the Thirteen, founder of the archaeology, history and foreign language departments of the Lyceum school of Humanities. Unfortunately, he's completely mental and dependent on a mystical artifact known as the Ice Crown, a fact blamed, among other things, for the bizarre questions on the Lyceum Entrance Exam, which was his attempt to rewrite the ACT from memory. Nowadays he just lives in a frozen realm generated by his crown and talks to penguins.

Still, he managed to raise a certain half-demon girl most of the way to adulthood, and that's got to count for something. Recently, he managed to get himself almost functional with the help of some pharmaceuticals, just long enough to see his adopted daughter off to college at his old school.

 **Steven "Fox" Foxham, PhD.:**

He's one of the little talking foxes from near the blast zone, as well as the Dean of English, the Bursar and whatever else anyone tells him to be. Really, he's a great guy, but would they just leave him alone, so he can finish translating Goethe?

His other interests include finding a new chancellor because he's already tired of the job, atoning for past mistakes and cooking Italian food for his girlfriend Vixie.

 **Sir Charles S. "Charlie" Colin, PhilD.:**

The last (and possible the only previous) chancellor, a mysterious man known for eating peanuts and being much older than he looks. He may have made a deal with Marceline's father, and certainly has been involved in shady dealings with the fairies. His mentor was almost certainly Simon Petrikov, not that he could be bothered to act like him. Thank Glob he's gone, right? Right, guys?

Like Nikita Kruschev, he's fond of making ambiguous threats, and like Howell he's fond of shouting in Latin, though he makes it sound much more pretentious than Howell does. Will he be back?

 **Sir Howell Rex, PhD:**

Master of the Knights. He's a mutant of some kind, with three eyes and very, very fast reflexes. He's also in his ninth century, though he's aged a little over the years. While his sense of humor is sometimes ominous, he's generally a great guy. No one knows who his husband was, though Sir Sue thinks it was the Master of Wizard City.

He's forgotten more about fencing than just about anyone who ever lived, though his substance problems years ago can't have helped. His other interests involve Zen meditation, curating the university library and recounting his past battles at excruciating length to everyone sitting at the bar.

 **Mungey, PhD.:  
**

He's one of the little jelly mutants from the outer wastelands. His people speak a corrupted form of English, but when he learned classical English he was entranced by grammar on a conceptual level that he learned about six other languages in a matter of a couple of years. He now speaks German (and teaches it), Dutch, Roumanian, Hebrew, Koine Greek and Latin. While one of the great linguists of the age (Foxham is honestly his main competition so far as the Lyceum goes), in other ways he acts more or less like a fifteen-year-old boy, including liberal use of pyrotechnics inside the Liberal Arts Building, a severe lack of an indoor voice and frequent use of the word "duuuuuude."

He's actually only seventeen, but for his species that's well into adulthood. He has no excuse. He's also been used as a convenient aerial surveillance system, as he's decently easy for an athletic person to hurl several stories up in the air, and reforms pretty quickly if he gets squished, for instance if he falls from a height of, oh, I don't know, several stories up in the air.

 **Ms. Carol Joy Donovan, MA.:**

A doctoral student teaching English Comp., Poetry Comp., and World Lit. at the university. She adores Marceline, but consistently annoys her by appropriating vampire culture. Noted for her habit of cultivating rare Andean cave bats in her office. Aside from Sir Howell, she's probably Foxham's only close friend in the faculty; when Chancellor Colin was fired, Fox gave her Colin's old office.

She's a big fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Carlos Williams and whoever wrote that song that The Sombreros did back in the day.

 **Sir Julian:**

A snake person, or snerson. He's in Pi Kappa Alpha, which should tell you everything you need to know. If not, let's just say that a chapter of his frat was once nearly disbanded for drunkenly beating a pink flamingo to death.*

 **Hunson Abadeer, alias "Martius Ossian," "Martin Oisin," et cetera:**

Lord of the Nightosphere, master torturer, famous incubus, and all-around prick. He happened to seduce a much nicer lady in the outskirts of Atlanta in the 1980's, resulting in the birth of a certain half-demon. Odder still is that he seems to have fallen in love with the mother, even though he should have been incapable of non-egocentric feelings, and he cohabited with her for some time. Perhaps we should say that "love" needs a good number of quotation marks around it in his case.

He enjoys breaking the damned on the famous spiked wheel passed down through his family, discovering new forms of bureaucratic torture, and smoking Resublimated Tincture of Souls in his ethereal pipe. Unbeknownst to his Legions of the Night, he also works as a line cook at a restaurant on Ooo in his spare time, to indulge his passions for simple carbohydrates and for making people's lives miserable.

Before that, he apparently came to the Lyceum at some point and might have had secret dealings with Charlie.

 **Death:**

He's literally death.

 **The Fairies:**

Marceline has only met one, but she was a real killer. Luckily Marcy managed to get away in time… right?

 **J. D. and his pack:**

Some coyotes from the Great Wastelands who have recently been sighted in the Appalachians, especially in the area around the Lyceum. Apparently, they knew Simon at some point, though exactly when is rather unclear.

They've sworn loyalty to the Vampire Queen, to her great dismay.

 **John Milton England, PhD.:**

A robot of some type, programmed to be as English as possible, apparently made from an old set of plate armor and various bits of electronics. He teaches English, because why the hell not? Noted for his discourse on the literary habits of the Roundhead officers in the English Civil War.

 **Bob James, M.D.:**

Well-liked young doctor in Wizard City, graduated from the Wiz-City/Lyceum medical exchange, Class of 2980.

 **The Master of Wizard City:**

Does he have a secret past with Sir Howell? What, indeed, _is_ he? Has he always been some form of giant ape?

 **Max Toadman, PhD:**

Giant toad noted for his controversial historical theories, some of which have been described by Mungey as "bull-ass-shit." He teaches history at the Lyceum and is very likely not to get his tenure now that his friend Dr. Colin has been banished.

*IRL: at the Hattiesburg Zoo in MS, 2014.


	2. Chapter 1

**January 26th, 2987**

 **Weather: fine**

 **Mood: existential**

 **Music: Telstar - The Tornados**

Dear diary,

Sometimes I don't understand Bonnie. I know she doesn't understand me. She's obsessed with, like, pretending to be human. I _knew_ humans. No big deal. But why waste time, I mean? Pretending to be something that you're not. She's like, basically her own thing, right? She came from the mother gum.

So she invited me to this party at the little elephant woman's place last night. There were a couple of princesses there, some candy people; standard fare, really. The boys were there, playing a little concert with their robot dingus, and Finn was singing in his computer voice. It was nice. But something happened there, something that makes me a little scared when I really think about it.

When I was ten or eleven, dad told me a story. He knew some depressed, stuffy old scholar dude from somewhere called Doichland, who was into some really, like, existential mess-he was really depressed about, like, life, the universe and everything. The dude tells my dad that there was nothing on Earth (I guess it was before the war, yeah. Earth, Ooo, same biz), that could make him say "I wish this moment would last forever." He said that there was no moment perfect enough.

So dad made a bet with him, like dad does; If the scholar ever wanted that to happen, dad got to take his soul to the Nightosphere. And then dad used some black magic to trick the scholar: he made him fall in love with some chick, and he turned his life around and got happy, and eventually the dude even said, like, "I want this moment to last forever."

Dad didn't take his soul, for some reason. If it was like, the one nice dad ever did, I'd believe it, but all dad would ever say was "the look on his face when I jumped out of the closet was totally worth it." I can still hear dad saying that...

But dad, he said it was a cautionary tale. If you want a single moment to last for the rest of your life, because you're so happy in that moment, then your happiness is dependent on things. You're not moving forward if you want to stay in one moment.

Well, Finn was singing, Bonnie was dancing with some random princess, and for a moment, I caught her eye from across the yard. We made eye contact for less than a second. But it wasn't tense, like it always is with Bonnie. I think she smiled at me. The music was groovy, this cool breeze was blowing, and I guess everything was just alright in Marceline-land for a few seconds.

I swear, if my dad had jumped out in the next second and dragged me to the Nightosphere for good, it wouldn't have tarnished that moment.

So here's the big damn question: Is happiness just some random junk that happens in your head because of things that happen, or is it a state of mind that I can reach if I try hard enough? I get so worried. And you know what else worries me? Simon is the happiest, most consistently happy person I even know. Just, like, try to wrap your head around that biz. Simon-that-lives-in-an-ice-cave, Simon.

So I'm determined not to let it get to me. I kind of want to try seeing Bonnie seriously again, so there's that. Nah, she's not gonna be into me again after last time.

 **January 30th, 2987**

 **Weather: foggy**

 **Mood: weird**

 **Music: Amberian Dawn - Cold Kiss**

Dear Diary,

While I was lying in bed this morning, I remembered this thing that happened about three hundred years ago:

I was off the reservation completely, because I went about a month without any red. I was about to suck out this little forest animal dude's blood, and he said "please, I have a family to feed" and he went on groveling for like, forever. But I wasn't listening, because I had slipped even further into a wacked-out feeding frenzy. I left him alone after that, and I went off in some random direction, sucking every hue of red out of my surroundings that I could find. There's still a little mutant town where there's splotches of grey on all the buildings from me sucking on them.

When I came to, I was all bloated up from eating too much red. I was lying in the gutter in that little town, with a bunch of glass beer bottles for a pillow. They'd actually thrown trash on top of me. I understood what they were saying to me. I wasn't the weirdest thing in that village, and I guess they were calling me typical trash. Luckily, my parasol was in there with me or I might have been stuck.

I realized I'd been _acting_ like typical trash.

I guess I've been acting that way now, too.

Grod, am I going to be a glob-damn teenager forever? Is it just fucking hard-wired into this mess called Marcy?

So I got up out of the gutter, and I looked around. I saw everything like I was seeing it for the first time. The buildings were pre-war, some of them, ones that used to be diners and a gas-station, with the pumps all busted down for parts. The town hall, I shit you not, had been a MacDougal's Fry Shop. But the houses and some of the shops were new, built out of good, solid mutant timber, like little story-book cottages and all that. I'd been through town a couple of times, but I noticed something new, that time.

As my head cleared and I hummed that old song about being an astronaut and leaving your wife, I noticed that all the buildings had different proportions. Some had doors that were twice as tall as they were wide, and some had doors that were three times as tall. And it was like that with the windows, and the roofs, and the height between stories. And it hit me that each little house was built for the person that lived there. Some mutants be tall, some don't be.

The sun was going down between two pine trees that stood alone at the end of the main street, and I was kicking myself for never noticing things like that before. Was I going through life like a kid, just seeing everything as a big mess of colours and shapes? I hoped not.

So, Marceline of three hundred years ago, I hate to break it to you, but not much has changed. I'm still a damn teenager. More observant, but does that even matter?

So I'm going on some kinda journey. Like, a quest. I've been on quests before.

But this is what dad would call a "quest of self-discovery." I'll write about it when I get back.


	3. Chapter 2

**March 3rd, 2987**

 **Weather: blah**

 **Mood: alright**

 **Music: Manfred Mann – Doo-wah-Diddy**

Dear diary, it has been 32 days since my last confession.

I had a hell of a time on the self-discovery trip or whatever it was called. What does that word even mean, 'hell?' Bonnie told me what hell was, once. Sounded boring, whatever it was. Like, some kinda made-up Nightosphere, I think. All the demons looked like little dudes with horns and red suits and they all poked you with pitchforks forever or some shit like that, IIRC.

I'd look _gewd_ in a red suit, to be honest. But pitchforks? That's just dumb. Demons use axes and swords, period.

Well, I was flying around out in the forest, north of the Slime Kingdom. The sun was going down exactly like it was in that village that one time, and I felt good about myself. Things were going right. I guess I'd managed to clear my head a little. I was strumming some three-note chords on my bass, tuned up real high. G-B minor-G-something. It was a good riff. I need to write a song that goes like that...

And who should show up but Leaf, that huntress wizard that I met at Shelby's party about a year ago. She was running across the branches up in the canopy-basic conjuring, nothing special-and she thought for the moment that I didn't see her.

So I acted like I hadn't noticed, and used my special sight-the "looking-all-

around-at-once" one. So I saw her circling around, preparing to swoop in and... do something. I don't know what. I kept going the way I was going, so she had to close her circle quicker than she thought. She followed me west for about an hour, both of us essentially hovering, but she at least tried to look like she was running from branch to branch-Iunno, maybe it's easier for her

mentally to act like she's making really big jumps instead of actually flying. I took to flight like a natural when I killed that little vamp dude, so I wouldn't know. Finally, I got her to lose sight of me for just a few seconds, when she had to go around this big tree that was sticking up from the canopy.

I immediately doubled back at top speed and flew up above the canopy behind her. (Let me tell you: being bad-ass is easy. Seeming to other people like you're bad-ass? It's a load of work.) So I came up behind her silent as the grave and I went "boo."

She screamed, of course. Flying thing with black hair and a killing light in its eyes coming towards you? You'd scream too.

Next, she threatened me with some kinda magical dagger, only, halfway through

doing that, she realizes that she knows me and that I'm laughing my butt off. So after she calmed down, we walked a while. I say we walked-I floated, she rode her animal summons, this really nasty-looking zombie elk that was _way_ past its expiration date. But it's the same idea-little miniature journey to nowhere together.

Funny thing about Leaf is, she's such a nice person on the inside. See, I have to act nice because I know I'm not, on the inside. I could just start drinking people's blood or worse at any moment if I didn't follow a hard set of rules. Leaf is almost the opposite-some people don't really have any aggression on the inside. They get trampled all over as kids, and they learn to show a tough face after a while. It's like that with her...

Well, I spilled everything, and not, like, in a cool way. I told her about Bonnie- turns out everyone fancies her, not just me - I told her about still feeling like a kid - and I told her I hadn't slept in six months. No, literally, I spilled stuff to her that I don't even tell you, diary. So, haha, by the way: I have acute insomnia! Sorry I didn't tell you before!

I barely know that girl, and I definitely don't like her that much. I mean, I can feel bad because she presents this whole false face to the world, and still wish she would just kiss somebody and open up. It's not like...

Oh my Glob, this sounds terrible- I was about to say "it's not like she has real problems, like me." Which isn't fair to either of us, honestly.

But like I was saying, I'm a real hot mess. Just, on impulse, I decide to spill my guts to this girl I barely know. I didn't know at the time why she listened to the whole thing. Looking back it's fairly obvious that she's got a thing for me, but I didn't notice at the time. It's not like she'd admit it- she gave me that whole "hard meat" speech where she misquotes "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse, and I didn't realize at the time she was talking about me. Glob, such commitment issues!

So we came to a little place out in the forest where she was making camp that week. It had a magical tent, instant well, invisible campfire-the works. It was in this little cove or clearing that, judging by the way the ground dipped in the middle and formed a circular ridge at the edge of the clearing, must have been a bomb crater. Sure enough, we got to the center and there it was: unexploded ordnance: my favorite kind. I think it was the same class of nuke that I saw falling towards Atlanta circa 1990... Well, you know what's on that spot now. Grod, I remember... my mother was screaming, Dad was muttering something terrible probably, and I just stared at the little dot falling towards the city. Then came the green clouds...

...I wonder if that memory's real. I was six then and I'm over a thousand now... either way I'm like a paper that's been rubbed out and written over just a _few_ too many times. I can see it when I close my eyes, but I can also see Bonnie naked with her hair done up in a big bow, and I'm sure that's never happened.

We talked until roughly midnight. She sat on the H-Bomb, and I just kinda floated nearby. She told me a little about her life, too-I'm not guessing when I say she was trampled on as a kid-and in passing, she mentioned going to college.

Now, I'd heard of college. It was this legendary place where the intellectuals of the old world would gather, supposedly. It was kind of like a school? I guess? But it was also where people of a certain age would go to grow up? Maybe I'm mixing two different things. At any rate, I'd heard the legends, and it always seemed like a nice place.

But she told me about college in the present tense.

"Yeah, I kinda dropped out or just really, uh, left. It was like, ten years ago."

"Wait, what? Where?"

"Way up near Magic City in the mountains. It's called the Heroic Lyceum. So I was telling you about this one time with these two dudes and a hammock..."

I listened, but barely heard after that. Look, I get onto Bonnie about obsessing over the past, but there were good things in the past that were worth bringing back. _College_ , for example. That word just does something to me. I know why now: It was where people went to mature, or at least, that's what Simon always said. Not that Simon was ever mature...

Hell, sign me up.

 _Hell, sign me up,_ I thought, and praps I was onto something.

I got in last night. I hadn't discovered myself yet, but it's a work in progress, I think.


	4. Chapter 3

**March 7th, 2987**

 **Weather: fair Mood: freaked out Music: The Paupers - Cairo Hotel**

I woke up. The room was flooded with daylight, like it always is on March 7th, when the sun shines right through the mouth of my cave. Only an inch of shadow lay between the sunbeam and my face.

I'd actually managed to sleep a few hours, at night, no less. I felt like I'd hit the bed like a meteor, but at least I'm not dying of fatigue today. So it was a decent start to the day. Or it would be if I managed to move without burning myself in that sunbeam. Rats, here was another problem-Leaf was on top of me.

 _Fuck, what did we do last night?_

I couldn't answer the question myself, so I decided to ask her.

"Fuck, what did we do last night?"

She didn't wake up. At least she hadn't turned into a plant or something on top of me. Two things bubbled up from my unconscious:

Thing one: If you don't get up, Marcy, you're going to burn to a crisp.

Thing two: The warm being on top of you is full of blood warm blood warm warm warm warm warm red rushing warm rushing red KILL BITE KILLLLL

My Glob, I almost did it.

Instead, I took a breath and counted to ten. The sunlight was an quarter-inch closer to me now. I counted again, because I was still thinking of blood. I guess I must have counted to thirty or forty before I was quite in control.

I asked her again, louder.

"Wha?"

"Leaf, what. did. we do. last night?!"

She came to her senses in a couple of seconds.

"Ugh, you invited me over. We ate some junk food, I drank a bunch of Smarty Juice and you drank some... blue. Like, off the oil painting over there, off a cereal box, out of the TV screen."

"Wait, you said I drank _blue._ "

"Yeah. It just came out of whatever you stuck your teeth into."

 _Your first vampire, huh?_ I thought. "No shit. But I've been sober for like, four hundred years."

"Well-"

"Leaf," I said, louder than maybe I should have.

"Yeah?"

"If you don't get off me in like, ten seconds, I'm going to get burnt to  
death by a sunbeam."

"Woah, really?" she said. She jumped up and I managed to roll over and off the bed and into the deep shadow on the floor. Sunlight grazed my hand, but it healed decently well. I guess that little bit of sleep was enough to give me most of my healing factor back. I could have probably survived much worse, in fact.

"Leaf, I'm sure it's been great, but I have, like, _more than two praerblems_ right now. Thanks for telling me what I did last night."

"I'll... get out of your hair," she said, looking put-off.

She ran downstairs and out of my house. I wondered how badly I'd janked up my latest interpersonal relationship. Then the word "blue" hit me like an icicle in the stomach. Well, it's like this: everything has an opposite. Blue is the opposite of red. Nobody really has to tell you that, you just kind of know when you're born. Well, red, especially real iron red from blood cells, makes me less hungry and more sober, while blue... well, it's like negative red. It causes a mild-feeding frenzy-I don't go totally off the handle, but I guess I would if I drank enough of it. In small doses, it's more like being really drunk and really hungry.

The last time I even touched the stuff was thirty years ago, regardless of what I told Leaf. I'd been capital-L Low, like some disgraced cosmonaut. I'd just broken up with Bonnie, for good this time. I went about my business, but everywhere I went, I saw blue, like all the other colours had turned grey and it stood out.

Wasn't there a movie Mom and Dad used to watch where the little girl's red dress did that? They only watched that movie when they thought I was in bed. They forgot I'm a twilight animal, I guess. But all I remember was that the girl died somehow, and you saw her dress in a pile of clothes, and all the other colours were kinda washed out to dirty grey but her dress was still dark red... it made me feel like all the colours were washed out in real life too. It was really sad and I can only half-remember why.

Well, if an ex-junkie starts seeing the stuff everywhere, what would you think would happen?

I fought it, but I couldn't really fight it. How can you put up a fight when you know you're going to lose? What did Dad use to say? " _It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks?"_ What are "the pricks," anyways? I mean, I know what a prick is... Dad being one of them, in fact.

I came to nine days later, in my kitchen, with my foot burnt clean off where a sunbeam touched it. It took an hour to regrow. I took blue a couple more times, with suitably disastrous results, and then, for a while, it didn't call to me. It was like I'd gotten sick of it. Well, here I am, 30 years later, and I have a problem with blue again.

Man, hump that: I have a problem with blue, a problem with red, and problems that have nothing to do with bright, primary colours. Insomnia, sunlight, adorable fascist dictators, any girl with green hair, Dad, that guy Billy who has a vendetta for me... I'm just problems all the way down, I guess. I don't have a soul, courtesy of my father, so what, then? Am I just problems and problems and problems like rubber bands in a rubber band ball with nothing in the middle?

I put some stuff together in my head this morning. I need to grow up, for real, or I'm going to hurt myself where it doesn't grow back one of these days. I'm like a diabetic in the Candy Kingdom, Simon always said, whatever that means.

And so here I am, diary. I'm going north and I'm taking you with me. I've decided to find that place and see if they can make me mature there. Grod help me.


	5. Chapter 4

**March 8th, 2987**

 **Weather: warm, stinging rain Mood: cautiously optimistic Music: Allman Brothers - Melissa**

Dear Diary:

Here's a haiku I just wrote:

 _Winter leans to spring,_  
 _As beside the narrow road_  
 _I drink the flowers._

As I write this, I'm sitting next to a little dirt path up above the Candy Kingdom proper, up in those grassy rolling hills that seem like they're the foothills of the northern mountains. Only, it's just perspective, because the mountains are on the other side of a big wasteland from them. It's morning, and I'm going to press on a few hours under cover of my parasol, then make camp under the big linden tree a mile up the way.

I had a hell of an evening yesterday.

I left the cave while it was still dark yesterday morning, with my axe for a bindle-stick. In the sack, I put a few changes of clothes, a couple of apples, and other essentials, and threw it over my shoulder like I was one of the No-Home Boys. Imagine that...

I made it through Bonnie's lands by lunchtime, flying quickly at high altitude, and by 12:45 I'd spotted a nice cave to spend the brightest part of the day in. I dive-bombed it at speed, because I could, pretending like I was falcon, and flew straight in the cave mouth faster than any living thing should go.

Of course, I nearly hit the back of the little grotto and had to turn into a bat in order to wave off quickly enough, dropping my axe on the cave floor as I did. Tranforming exhausted me, since I was running on about three hours of sleep and a lot of hopes and prayers. I turned back into myself slowly, like coming back to your senses after a massive high. Parts of me kept being a bat for about an hour, I guess, while I worked on keeping my internal organs in the right shapes and the right places.

After that, nothing much happened for about six hours. I played my axe, listened to some music on that broken MePod Bonnie gave me about a hundred years ago, and thought a lot about how much I miss my record player at home. But then, as the sun went down and the frogs and the crickets started up, I heard him.

I didn't hear him with my ears, I heard him telepathically. Whether he knows it or not, his subconscious is loud as balls, loud enough that even I can hear it, and I'm half-deaf by vampire standards. A lot of the time, what I've come to know as _The Billy Song_ is running through his head. It's an infantile rhyme he made up about his "heroic deeds," half of which never happened anyways.

Then he started shouting in to me. " _Abadee-uh, come out! Mah-celine Abadee-uh! Your time is he-uh!_ "

Here's how it is: Billy first saw me at a bad moment. I was sucking a little blood out of a pretty young mutant woman I met at a bar. She was totally into it, for the record. He's had me down as Public Enemy Number One ever since then, though. That was easily fifty years ago, and even now that he's retired, unretired, gotten posessed, apparently died in another universe, and come back from that _somehow_ , he still has a little spot on his belt for me, between the notch he made when he iced the Lich of Atlanta and the notch from the time he fought a bear. Yeah, he still brags about that damn bear.

He's a superstitious old man: if he ever gets the drop on me, he won't just kill me, he'll bury me in multiple places and _then_ stake my heart, like a damn Van Helsing boy. And this is the third time this year I've run into him. There are four big chips in my axe from that idiotic sword he calls No-Tongue, and that's just since the last time I've sharpened it.

So I considered my options. I was exhausted both physically and magically, so I couldn't use my demon form and I couldn't turn into a bat and escape. I'd hate to lose my axe anyways. Wolf-form, Snake Form, Scissorhands: all out of the question. Maybe if I had even an hour of sleep, but what's the use in wishing?

So I had to stand and fight, and hope my muscles wouldn't give out. I walked to the mouth of the cave and faced him, axe over my shoulder. There he was, about ten feet from me, black against the sunset. He's huge and well-muscled but not very graceful, which is the only real advantage I have. Other than time, that is. I'll outlive the jackwad eventually.

The last bit of sunlight stung, but didn't burn, as I squinted to see him better. This was strange, though; he wasn't carrying or wearing his sword.

"Mah-celine, I must talk to you," he shouted.

"Yeah, jeez, I'm right here," I shouted back.

"I'm giving you one last chance to tuwn you-uhself in to the lawuh," he said, only slightly quieter.

"Billy, we had this conversation once. What law even is there?! Princess Bubblegum? Because you tried that and she laughed in your face."

"I'm wu-wu-wuwuhking-wuwaking fo-wah- that is to say, I'm in the employ of the Fie-uh Kingdom now. They appweciate lawuh, unlike some."

"Sewiously? I mean, _seriously?_ " I asked. "You want me to turn myself in to _them_? Billy, it's been fun fighting you and all, but you're getting a little dumb in your old age."

"Then I must kill yew." He _charged._

I jumped over to the side of the cave mouth and pressed myself up against it. He couldn't stop and plowed right past me. He bumbled around in the cave trying to find his footing.

It's at this point that some small, primitive part of my brain seized control, like a damn government coup. I needed energy if there was a protracted fight, and for the first time in like twenty years, I didn't feel even slightly conflicted about sucking someone's blood. So I jumped in and latched on to him like a leech. I didn't get the neck, which was probably good, because he'd make a sucky vampire if I turned him. There were enough veins in his shoulder for me to get some red cells out of him in the second or two before he shook me off against the cave wall.

Ah, blood! Not just red, but iron red! I felt good. I felt like I'd slept recently, even. But there was another dimension to it. I suddenly felt kinda stoned or drunk or something... suddenly my heart was racing and my hands were shaking. And I wanted more.

 _Fuck_ , I thought. _Billy is sorta blue all over. Red plus blue equals... purple. Which does what, exactly?_

It was at about that moment that I lost control completely and really let loose on Billy. I chased him from the cave whacking him over the head with my axe and cackling like a hen. I can't remember a lot of the things I shouted, but they were all to the tune of " _MURDERSTABKILLCHOPWOUNDBLOODBLOODBLEEDINGBLOOD_ " and so on.

I remember sitting on the ground and watching his little black silhouette as he ran wildly off in the direction of the sunset. I giggled like a maniac, I think, mingling with the sound of his terrified screaming, which seemed to go on for quite a while after I stopped chasing him, echoing through the night air.

Well, I have to worry about purple now, and red when I might get blue mixed in. It's funny, I thought I would have discovered that at sometime in the last thousand years. Maybe I have and it hit me hard enough that I don't remember it now. It wouldn't be the only time I've ever had amnesia.

Well, anyways, I eventually crashed, like the red and blue kinda balanced out and left me where I'd been before, minus all the energy I spent beating up Billy. Or maybe it was just a normal come-down but not as bad because I actually had some red in me when it happened. Glob knows.

I had to crawl like a lizard to make it back in the cave, but I drained the rest of my apples and felt all right after that. I even got some sleep from sheer exhaustion before the morning light came and I had to set out again. Aside from my accidental run in with purple, I guess the journey's been alright so far.

Here's another haiku:

 _As the year matured_  
 _And became a young woman-_  
 _I thought of a song._


	6. Chapter 5

**March 11th, 2987**

 **Weather: clear Mood: Emotionally exhausted Music: Mitski - Towney**

Dear Diary:

I had to walk part of the way, because I got too exhausted to fly more than a few feet, but I got here somehow. It was mid-day on the 10th when I arrived, and that was yesterday. It was raining, thankfully, and the sun was completely hidden for most of the day. Eventually I got into the mountains and found the pass with the totally not fake-looking cliff in it.

I knew this part would come sooner or later. I'd have to turn up in Wizard City, looking like a hobo and, strictly speaking, not a wizard, and ask for directions to the Lyceum. If you'd think it'd go badly, you're not even scratching the surface.

Bonnie thinks only wizards can get into the city. That's not exactly true. Anyone can get in-if they have a wizard endorse them and then make an apointment with Grand Master Wizard to get permission to stay in the city for an amount of time. Which means that I had to sit outside that secret gate and wait for someone I knew to pass through. The irritating thing is, I know the password, but the gate doesn't know my voice.

See, if I hadn't been whacked out this whole time, I would have just gone to the Ice Kingdom, an hour from my place, and gotten Simon to take me there. But no, it was some mystic quest I had to set out on alone... despite the fact that I might be exhausted and starving by the time I got there. I remember when I was always well-rested and my powers were reliable and so was my head, to some extent... Glob, what happened to me in the last six months?

But I was there, and there was no going back. I needed to get in soon, too, because the sun was coming out. Even in the shadow, it was damn hot and if you think you have trouble with heatstroke, try being a vampire _and_ a demon _and_ underweight. So I sat and waited in the shadow of the side wall of the canyon, drinking some red from the rocks and feeling refreshed, if sunbaked.

I waited six hours. Some random cubeheaded dude appeared on a broomstick, heading towards the magic gate, and I decided to try my luck.

"Hey!" I shouted.

He circled around in the air and shouted. "Identify yourself, Normie."

"Marceline Abadeer, Queen of the Vampires. I have business with the Master."

The cubehead looked at me as if to say _bitch, please_. "Yeah, and I'm Princess of the Candy Kingdom. Get lost, poser."

I waited another hour. A few wizards came out later. I guess the Master sent them to look for me, but I had enough places to hide, and they just smoked and poked around just outside the gate for a minute.

After another half-hour, I saw exactly the second-to-last person I wanted to: Ash. Not cool Ash Jorgensen from diving club, Ash the Enchanter that I used to date, Ash that tried to brainwash me. There he was, smugly riding his smug carpet. Am I bitter? I don't think so. Smug smughole. Well, thank Grod, he didn't see me. He said the password and rode right into the city. I ran for the gates, but they closed before I ever got there.

I sat with my back against the gate that night. I may have gotten a few minutes of sleep, but nothing refreshing. I had to move again before light, because the canyon didn't offer much shelter. I had barely taken shelter among the rock formations when Ash left the city again.

I suddenly had a sickening thought in my mind: of all the people I was liable to meet out there, he was the one most likely to let me into the city, if he thought it'd get him something. Barring the miniscule chance of Simon showing up, it might be my only opportunity to get in. _Why?_ I kept thinking. He's literally one of the worst people I've ever met.

But some sense of fate had already taken over. If he was my only chance to get in, I couldn't pass it up. I muttered _"it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,"_ and then I called out to Ash.

"Ash, get down here."

He swooped around and was all up in my face in about four seconds.

"Um... fancy meeting you here, babe." He made that clichéd "sexy" face he always made. I nearly slapped it off of him.

"Ash, I need to get into the city."

"I, uh, thought you kinda, had some twerps beat me up."

I nearly exploded. No, I didn't make Finn and Jake beat him half-to-death, they just did it. And what if I had? He brainwashed me.

"Ash, listen. You can't just control people like that."

He blew the hair out of his face, but it was more like he blew my words out of the air before they landed in his ears.

"Ash, listen. I didn't make them..."

He turned his carpet and went to drive away.

And then there was this feeling in my chest, like... like I was about to do the hardest thing ever, but it was somehow easy at the same time... like I knew I was going to do it, so it wasn't even me doing it anymore, but like Fate or Grod or somebody else doing it with my hand.

And I said it. _I_ apologized to _him_. "Ash, LISTEN! I'm sorry for that, even if you aren't sorry for anything."

He turned back towards me and stared at me for like ten seconds. "Wow, this is new. Trying to win me back?" he said with a scoff.

"Ash, no, just... no. But listen, I forgive you for what you did," I said. I don't know how, but I said it.

"Like, why, though?"

"Because you can't _make me_ be mad at you. I won't let you anymore."

"So you're not mad that I was, like, a bit of a jerk sometimes."

My mind said "!", but my mouth said "Uh, yeah."

"Gimme ten bucks," he said.

 _"_ _What_ _?!"_

"Look, if people ask, I got to give them some reason why I let you into the city."

So he let me in, and I actually gave him ten pieces of silver. I'm more surprised that he left me alone after that, instead of following me around trying to convince me I should date him, but he told me he had somewhere to be and I guess he was telling the truth.

It hurt like hell to apologize, because he really did deserve to be stomped by that giant foot, but somehow forgiving him didn't hurt. Maybe it's like the ultimate way of showing that you're better than the other person. But is that really forgiving if you say "I forgive you" but mean "fuck you?" I'd ask Mom if she were here. I'd ask Dad, but he always said forgiveness was an infectious disease. That kinda figures, I guess, being a demon lord and all. "Eternal spirit of damnation and revenge," and all that.

Wizard City is about how I remembered it from the last time Ash dragged me there. It looks a lot like what was left in Tennessee about ten years after the War: a poorly maintained mountain-village type of deal, all peeling paint, ugly white shutters and sagging roofs. The streets are paved with cobblestones, more or less just because they could afford cobblestones, but it somehow only makes it seem _more_ like a medieval shithole. For that matter, do you know what's in Tennessee now? _Breakfast Kingdom_. Barf.

But I'd never tell the Master that his little town wasn't _perfect_. He's a bit sensitive, like Bonnibel is about the Candy Kingdom, except more so. Most people who become wizards and princesses are like that: usually they were picked on in school, so they're... sensitive. The big egos, the ceremonies, the titles-it's all because a couple of kids a grade ahead of them used to lock them in lockers or hang them up by their jackets. It was different with Bonnie, but with the same result.

Anyways, if you're dealing with balloon people, you don't throw darts. Even _I_ know that.

My meeting with the Master went well, though. I came here to ask a simple question, and I thought I might as well ask him. That way, he didn't have to grant me any time in the city if he didn't want to. But he was actually very helpful. He told me all about the college, how I could get in, and _how much it would cost._

I sat in his massive office, struggling to make eye contact with his face, a story and a half above me. I've heard he was an orangutan in a zoo before the war. Lich Radiation has done stranger things, but with that dreadlocked white beard he looks more like the abominable snowman than a giant mutant ape. Fupping terrifying, whatever he is.

So here's what he told me: Twenty years after the Atlanta Bombing and the end of the Old World, the last few _really_ educated mutants and surviving humans got together and decided to preserve what they knew. They built libraries, like the one near the Candy Kingdom but bigger and better, and reprinted ancient books. They tought their followers everything about the Old World, what dead languages they spoke there, and what mistakes they made, so that the world might have a chance to avoid them this time around. They made a college like the colleges of the Old World, and actually kept it open for the last 1,000 years, somehow-most likely by getting chummy with the wizards who came along later.

And they raised up heroes to protect the school: _The Knights of the Heroic Lyceum_. The Master rambled on and kept losing his place, but the image I got from what he told me was beautiful: thirteen of the bravest warriors of every generation, all mounted on horses or dragons or whatever else they could ride, with swords that glowed by moonlight and flamed in the daylight. And they rode to protect the knowledge of the Old World. The Master had fought alongside them once. He got a tear in his massive eye when he told me about that battle, and as much as I hate to admit it, it was a bit contagious. I'd look good in armor, come to think of it.

The next semester (whatever that is) starts a month from now, he said. It costs a lot more than I thought it would, but the Master said that _I, of all people,_ would have no trouble finding the money. He said it two or three times, in fact, and raised those massive pelts that he has for eyebrows as if to make it perfectly obvious that he had failed to make something obvious. Also, there's a test I'd have to take, but he kept saying that it wouldn't be a problem. It separates the adults from the children, he said, like that's supposed to be encouraging.

Well, I think I'm going to give it a try, assuming I can find one of these mysterious benefactors that the Master mentioned... He let me stay the night in the guest wing of his palace, and said that he'd let me see his best healer this afternoon about my _problems_.

You know, it's a shame he's ruler of these dongwads, because he's actually really nice.


	7. Chapter 6

March 11, 2987, cont'd

 **Weather: Dry, dark and windy Mood: More optimistic Music: Blitzen Trapper - Booksmart Baby**

So the doctor the Master sent me to was that cubehead from yesterday, Bob James. Hey, so did I mention I'd told him a few things about his parents after he insulted me? No, I guess not. Well, he got an earful for talking trash with me while I was burning up out there in the canyon. I still halfway stand by what I said.

There was tense moment when I stepped into the exam room. First off, I don't like exam rooms. They're cold, cramped, and they remind me of that time Simon took me to the free clinic at Lasthaven when I was eight, because I had pinkeye. They'd never seen a demon before, and they nearly cut me open to see what I was. Then Simon came back from the restroom, saw the doctor preparing a scalpel, and froze everyone in the place with his crown. I didn't see him again for days while he found his way back to sanity, so I had to wait with a bunch of thawing corpses in a creepy-ass clinic for the better part of a week.

Second of all, what do you say to a guy who's about to put his cold, gloved hands all over you, when not twenty-four hours before you called him the son of a diseased slut?

He looked at me, and I looked at him. I awkwardly laughed, more to break the silence than anything. The atmosphere in the room got even tenser... more tense? And then _he_ awkwardly laughed. We both awkwardly laughed, and I was entirely unsure whether we were laughing together or separately. But we laughed, and after that he seemed to consider it a moot point.

So he examined me. You know, first came the "say ahhh" bit, then he stuck a thing in my ear, and after that he used lot of electronic instruments to scan me. He thinks they're magic, but they were just how people did medicine before the Bombing. Anyways, he scanned me up and down, left and right, poked me with some sticks, and then tried to draw blood from my finger. He found out to his amazement what I'd already told him, that I wouldn't flipping be a vampire if I had any blood of my own.

Then he showed me some "magic" pictures of my insides, that were literally pulled up on a computer with an "intel inside" sticker. Grod, wizards would call _fire_ magic if we didn't all know the trick of making it. _Behold, by rubbing these two magic sticks together, I shall create a potent fire spirit!_

So I have no stomach, apparently. I mean, it would stand to reason-I don't eat solid food. I also have about a dozen things in my chest and stomach cavity that he couldn't name and couldn't figure out from the scans. I told him that, logically, I drink blood and primary colours, so that stuff has to go somewhere. That takes care of, like, at least two mysterious organs, and on the other hand, I can also suck people's souls out, which must take a _bumtch_ of specialized equipment. So that answers that, right?

And then he started in with the questions. Do I smoke? I told him I don't breathe but once every two or three minutes when I'm resting. I think I could bumping _die_ if I smoked. Do I take heroin, meth, or slab? No, since I can't smoke, I'd need working veins for those, I said. He looked at me funny, like he expected me to say "no" in a different way. Do I drink?

I gave a slow, "no shit I drink"-kind of nod. Do I drink _alcohol?_ he asked.

So at this point, I was wondering if it had really sunk in for Bob James that he was examining a _vampire._ Does that word mean "street performer" here or something? So I decided to start being a little heavy-handed with that point. "I don't drink... viine," I said, trying not to laugh.

"Then what kind of alcohol do you drink?"

If I hadn't been exhausted, I would have become a wolf involuntarily. I explained very patiently what a vampire actually was, which he claimed he already knew, and what exactly I all the time be drinking. After about an hour of this delightful conversation, he asked "Wait, what was your problem again?"

"Acute insomnia."

"Oh, _oh!_ I have something for that. My brother Ron makes a wonderful potion. And he _always_ delivers."

He prescribed me some kind of bright green herbal stuff that he said would knock out an elephant. That's supposed to be encouraging? I'm halfway a junkie already and you're prescribing what I can only guess is some kind of booze or narcotic, if not both? I'm not touching the stuff unless I'm desperate, but I took the bottle of it. It'll look cool on a shelf, if nothing else.

So I came back to the guest quarters after dark, and felt like banging my head against the wall. But then, that's stupid, isn't it? I started the day with only one goal, to find out about the college, and I'd actually gotten several things done, even if they weren't all _useful_ things. So that's a pretty good day for me, I guess.

Which brought me to my next order of business: I had to find out who exactly the Master thought was going to pay for me to go to college.

And suddenly I was feeling guilty: Why should someone else pay for my quest of self-discovery or whatever it was again? But the Master talked like a hundred thousand silver pieces wasn't much money, and like there was a certain person who was just dying to pay. After I thought about it a while, I thought: _I don't know what to feel or think, so I guess I'll do._ And by "do," I meant "find this mystery person and ask _them_ what to feel and think. And also ask them for a wossname...scholarship."

So I called some people. I radioed in to the central phone exchange of North Ooo, and asked the little candy dude who worked the switchboard to patch me into a certain 666 number, because just dialing it never works anymore. A minor demon came on the line and asked me to hold, likely forever. I used _the voice_ on him, and he put me through to a middling demon. Lather thoroughly, rinse, repeat. Eventually middling demons in the Nightosphere call center became major ones, and major ones became top executives. After what seemed like eternity, I was on the line with Dad.

" _Sweetie,_ " he said, when we'd gotten down to business. "With silver... you know I never touch the stuff, regardless of what that Iscariot character said. I would if I could, but I have a business to run."

"Yeah, I knew it was a long shot. Thanks anyways," I said. I hope I sounded sincere, because I tried to.

"It's just life, Marceline, _Darling_. You know what I always say?"

" _It is hard for thee to kick againt the pricks?_ " I said.

"Hhhhhwhat?" he snorted. "I'm sure I haven't said that in a thousand years. I was just going to say 'if every corn-dog were perfect, then...' oh, how does that saying go? Anyways, I have work to do, but do come home some time! Love you!" Click.

It was a long shot, I knew it. So I dialed the Society for the Advancement of Supernatural Beings.

"Yes, sorry," the secretary said. "Our last scholarship for the calendar year was taken by... ah, yes, I believe he's some manner of intelligent bear. Quite intellectual, in fact."

"Thanks, anyways," I said. It figured. I'm a damn adult, technically speaking, and I should be paying for it. It's just kinda hard to get a job when your skill-set is so specific and you're also allergic to daylight. I called a few other interest groups associated with the SASB, and it was the same at each one.

So I called the Candy Kingdom, just on the nonce. Somehow Bonnie was the one who answered.

" _Marceline._ "

 _Glob_! She took my name and put two lifetimes of complicated emotion into it, not just for her but for me as well.

" _Bonnibel_ ," I said, and hoped it had sounded as strong as when she'd said mine.

"... I hope you're not calling collect," she said.

"Hey, do you know about college scholarships for vampires?"

"Marceline, it's getting late. I see you called collect from Wiz-City. Hopefully you didn't just do that to joke around." Her voice as she said that would have reduced a candy person to syrup, I'm sure, but I'm not easily pushed around.

"I'm serious. I just want one until I can find a job. I want to attend the Lyceum. Do you know of anyone?"

The tone in her voice was completely different when she responded after a few seconds. " _Marceline,_ that's... that's great. I always like to see people pursuing education. I don't know who offers scholarships specifically for vampires, but, um... wait."

"Yeah?"

"You haven't served in anyone else's military, have you? Or married anyone?"

"No, not since... back then."

"Then you're still a Candy Kingdom citizen from... from _back then_. I sent a bunch of money up there about five-hundred years ago. They guarantee education for any of my citizens that want it, up to ten per year. And you'd be the first ever to want to."

"What, really?"

"Yeah, didn't the Grand Master tell you that?"

So I thanked her several times and hung up.

You know, that was my first conversation with Bonnie in a long time that wasn't like, terrible. Well, my world's on fire, how about yours? Look out college, here I come! 


	8. Chapter 7

**March 20th, 2987**

 **Weather: Nicely overcast Mood: Awed Music: Grateful Dead - Dark Star (version off Live/Dead)**

Sup Diary.

So, like, a _lot_ has happened since I've had time to write anything down. This is gonna be a long one.

I've been to the Lyceum campus twice already. It's humping huge. They have this little fortified city set up in a seldom-used mountain pass about ten miles from Wizard City. It's protected by four huge stone towers with battlements and everything, and a circling wall that one could comfortably land small airplanes on top of. Inside, it's like a small city, complete with parks, city squares and shops. There's libraries and buildings for taking classes in, and a church like the one where... where...

Never mind that. So the first time I went to the campus, it was for information. This was about seven days ago. I went by a rented magic carpet since I was still too exhausted to fly. I went early in the morning so I didn't have to worry about losing my parasol, but it was lucky, because they put me through hell before letting me see a single person who could answer a damned direct question.

So eventually, after seeing all these bureaucrats that would put Dad's staff to shame, I was taken to see the chancellor. Now here's a man who would put _Dad_ to shame. The chancellor is an enormous, bald mutant man who sits behind a desk in the exact center of a perfectly round office, like one of those machines that talks to a satellite or something, the kind that has to be in the right place down to the millimeter or they won't work. He wears a suit that looks like it cost a thousand pieces of silver, and he _eats peanuts_. He eats them constantly from a little crystal bowl without, like, dropping a single crumb. And he signs important documents without reading them. No, literally, from everything I've seen and heard, that's all he does.

And _this_ was the guy who could answer all my questions? Of course not, but he was apparently the only person who could refer me and my questions to the "vice-provost," _whom I'd already seen!_ Not only that, but he took a fripping hour to stop with his damn rambling about the economy and tell I needed to see the vice-provost. By this time, the sun was beginning to show behind the wall in the window behind him, and I was nervous that it'd get bright in there and I'd have to excuse myself.

Finally, he said, in a voice like tectonic plates, "well, Ms. Balladeer, hum, dee dee dum, yeeeeees, what I'd really think would be key is if you took a note from me down to the vice-provost and referred these specialized questions, that you, hemmm, haaaave, to him. As you understand," he said, stretching every word out to the breaking point, "my time is raaaather, mmmmm, valuable."

And then he took five more minutes of mumbling about the economy to actually get around to scrawling the note down on a piece of paper. What he handed me said _"steve just deal with this won't you. signed, CHARLIE."_

And I thought my father had invented bureaucracy...

I got out of the office just before the sun became too much, and made my way back to the vice-provost's office. I'd been in about an hour before, for five minutes because I needed him to refer me to the scholarship office. Like, they use the word "refer" in such a fucking strange way here. As far as I can tell, it means, like, "tell me to go to a place," only I can't go to the place if the wrong person tells me at the wrong time.

I hadn't been able to pay much attention to my surroundings during that mess of paperwork and referrals, so when I entered his office the second time, it might as well have been the first. I recognized it, I recognized him, but more like I'd passed the office while walking down the hallway.

He was one of those standard mutant foxes that evolved in the Atlanta radiation zone. These people, I can get along with perfectly. They're all sad, solitary animals who spend most of their life scavenging for food, shelter and company. Yeah, they're basically my spirit animal.

The vice-provost sat in a cramped windowless office, at a low, scarred-up desk. He was using a pre-war typewriter that looked to be held together with bandage tape, rubber bands and shoelaces. Scattered everywhere across the desktop were books, most of them about a thousand years old. Some were falling apart in plastic baggies, and some were in stacks or between marble bookends, but five or six were lying open in a loose semi-circle around the fox, and he was always pausing to look at one or the other, then nodding and typing in short bursts.

As I came in, he looked up and gave me that half-hearted but sincere smile that all foxes give. I very apologetically showed him the note.

So finally, there was someone sensible to talk to. I explained to him that I was a Candy Kingdom citizen (which felt weird as fuck), and that there was supposed to be money for me to go to college. He knew what I was talking about immediately and said it wouldn't be a problem. He told me several things about the test I was going to have to take. He made it sound bad, but... _not-bad_ at the same time? Like, it was going to be hard, but in a good way?

"But now that you're here," the fox said, "it'd be a shame for you to leave until you've met some of the faculty you'll be studying under. Do let me... um... do let me show you around."

"But you're working on something," I said.

"Oh, nonsense. It's just a little project of mine. I'm translating _Faust_ into Inglish. Do you know _Faust,_ Ms. Abadeer?"

"I think I've heard the name somewhere."

"Well, take my class in the fall and you'll learn all about it. Anyways, I'm Dr. Steve Foxham, but you can, em, call me Fox for the time being. I'm the VP, Chair of the Inglish Department, Bursar, Dean of Students, and anything else Charlie tells me to do these days. God, I'm gunning for that tenure..."

Foxham stood up, and read a few lines from the sheet on his typewriter. I think it was something like _"And if I say to the transitive moment, 'stay! You are so beautiful!' then you can clap me in irons, for I will gladly be damned."_

"Fox, I think I'm going to take your class," I said, without thinking.

He smiled again, and showed me out into the hallway. "Well, if you're interested in the liberal arts, let's go to the Arts and Letters Building."

Outside, we walked across the square. It was a bright morning, and I had to put up my parasol, but it wasn't unpleasant. Birds were singing in the row of ancient linden trees that lined the edges of the square, and from somewhere I heard a musical jangle that sounded like fencing practice. _Like the old days_ , I thought.

I noticed that Foxham was squinting in the light.

"Night creatures for life, am I right, prof?"

He smiled. "Night creatures... Which is funny, because foxes are actually twilight animals."

"Me too! People don't know that's a thing. They think you're either nocturnal or wossname... diurnal."

"Crepuscular, that's what we are," he said, as we reached a tall brick building opposite the administration offices."

Inside, he took me up to the third floor and introduced me to some of the teachers. There was a little, fuller-bodied mutant woman, dressed in all black, who seemingly lived in her office, which was dark, dank and full of literal freaking bats. She was introduced to me as Ms. Donovan, some kind of teacher.

"So what exactly do you teach?" I asked.

She leaned forward over her desk and in the most cliche Transylvanian accent I've ever heard, even from myself, she said "poetrrrry." Then she threw her head back and gave a surprisingly convincing maniacal laugh, which escalated and gave no sign of stopping while Foxham and I excused ourselves.

"Foxham, ughh, that makes me mad!" I said in a low growl, when we were out of earshot of her door. "She's pretending to be a vampire! She's pretending to be me!"

"Ehh, let her..." he said. "Or be flattered. It's not like it makes you any less what you are."

I let it go after that, but it still pisses me...

Next was the assistant chair of the Inglish Department, Dr. Ingland. A bit on the nose? He was some kind of metal robot, and, like, I guess he was programmed to be as Inglish as possible? He had an Inglish flag painted on his chest, a portrait of some kinda Inglish Queen on the wall, and in the first ten seconds, he'd called Foxham "old bean," said "pip-pip" twice, and offered me tea. Which, you know, being sorta civilized sometimes, I accepted. I don't metabolize tea well, but I like the taste and the caffeine gives me twice the jolt, probably because I don't have a liver or some junk like that.

With a metal finger, Dr. Ingland pushed a button, and a butler robot appeared instantly from a side door with a tray with a teapot and stuff on it. I shit you not, he had a butler robot. They didn't look like Bonnie's robots or those Mo things, because they were less box-shaped and more... I dunno, like suits of armor, with the funny articulated joints covered by overlapping panels?

Dr. Ingland told me about some of his literature classes, talking extremely fast in a fake Inglish accent, and I barely had time to finish my tea before Foxham apologized to Ingland and continued the tour.

As we walked down the hall, a big bottle-rocket flew suddenly out of a half-opened office door with a hiss. Foxham ran the opposite way on all fours, so fast that he was around the corner before I could blink. The rocket bounced around and then went off with an impressive bang.

I knocked on the door.

"Come in, come in!"

Inside, in the dim, cramped office, heavy white smoke was still pouring out of the mouth of the old glass Cola bottle in the jelly mutant's hands. He was translucent green, about four feet tall, and grinning from ear to nonexistant ear.

So I said "Hey, doc, you got a valuable artifact from a thousand years ago, from, like, one of the greatest civilizations ever, and you launch _fireworks_ from it?"

And he just smiled even more somehow and said "yah."

 _"Coool,"_ I said. I was genuinely impressed.

"So while I'm waiting for Foxham to come back, what do you teach?"

"Classical languages. _Everyone_ takes my Doich class. They all say it's quote, totally rad, unquote. Dunno why," he said. He dropped a smoke bomb, and when the smoke cleared he was sitting in his chair, with his pseudopods or whatever up on the desk.

"So tell me about Doich-if you don't mind, I mean."

"Es ist cooooooool!" he said. "Wenn Sie es sprechen würden, wären Sie auch cool!"

"Kaywhat."

"I said it's really cool and if you spoke it, you'd be cool too!":

"Oh, I been cool. I'll remember it, though," I said, beginning to excuse myself because Foxham had just shown up at the door.

Foxham looked at him funny for a minute. The green man seemed to relish the attention.

So the tour went on. I met about a dozen other professor, but I can't get those ones out of my head. They seem like the kind of people I used to hang with before, like, I got square. Well, maybe I'll take their classes and maybe I won't. I still haven't decided.

A few days later I was back on campus for the test. Oh, the test. I've got to leave now because I have to go to something called orientation or orienteering, forget which, but I'll write about the test when I get back. Later, diary. *She gone.*


	9. Chapter 8

**March 25th, 2987**

 **Weather: Too damn bright Mood: Anxious Music: Shuishan Yui - Drunken Madness**

So I took the " _Lee._ " That's L.E.E. - "Lyceum Entrance Exam" day before yesterday. Then I went through " _orientation_ ," which was mostly touring the campus again, except this time the guide was a testosterone-addled moron in a black- and yellow-striped suit with runes on the pocket and a woman in an ugly yellow dress, and there were a bunch of teenagers taking the tour.

It was fucking boring. Something interesting did happen the day before the test, though.

I was chilling in the guest room. I felt like I should be getting ready, but everyone told me not to sweat it, so I wasn't sweating it. I'm good at not sweating it.

Okay, so after I wrote that line, I stopped to think about it, and maybe I'm not that good at it. But I damn well _look_ like I'm not sweating it, anyways.

I couldn't have gotten ready if I wanted to. They told me the test was about seeing if you're an intelligent, logically-thinking adult. There's no faking that, they said, so don't sweat it. It was a constant refrain, really. The Grand Master told me not to sweat it. Foxham told me not to sweat it. I'm sure the green guy would tell me the same thing, in some totally radical way.

But that night, around eight-o-clock, there came a knock at the door, and before I could get it, Simon walked in, with snow in his hair. It was piled up inside his crown, freezing into ice wherever it touched skin, and falling on the floor whenever he moved. He had an almost-lucid look in his eye.

"Simon! What are you doing here?"

"Marce... Marceli..." he stammered. "Marcy!" I was almost startled by it. He hadn't called me Marcy in hundreds of years.

"Marcy, I wanted to tell you that I'm so proud of you!"

It was hard, but I took his hand. It was ice cold, a twisted, mummified claw that somehow still looked like the hand I held as a small child, when my mother was dead and my real father had fucked off to take over grandpa's empire.

"I... I knew you would be, Simon. You're..."-I gulped-"you're, like, part of the reason I'm here."

"Marcy, I'm not going to stay this way very long. There's something called thorazine, an ancient medicine, and too much of it could kill me, but I wanted to come see you off to college. I made him... the other me, I made him find some and take it. The effort itself nearly killed me, but I have another hour at least, enough to see you and then get safely away before I go mad again."

"Simon, you shouldn't have hurt yourself for me!"

"I want to give you three things before I leave," he said, and opened a little brown paper bag he had with him. He pulled out a men's dress watch with a brown leather band.

"You're about to take the ACT, more or less, so you need a watch," he said, and handed it to me. "That'll help you pace yourself, so you know when to slow down and when to hurry. Also, I bet it'll look nice on you."

I put it on. It did look nice. It had a little hair-line crack in the face, but it seemed to run well.

"It'll help you get to class on time too! And you really need some Number Two pencils, but I couldn't find any. These are the best pencils you can buy in Wizard City." He pulled out a bundle of fifteen or twenty wood pencils tied with twine, handed them to me, and then crumpled up the bag.

"Simon," I said. "You really didn't have to go to all this trouble! This watch looks expensive. It's a working pre-war Timex. These go for thousands!"

"Marcy, I've never had a daughter, but..."

Before I could stop myself I said "Don't, Simon, you'll just make us _both_ cry!"

"...never mind, Marcy. I did have a daughter, and she's making me very proud."

We both teared up, thinking of the old days. I think we both nearly bawled.

"Go on, get a doctorate and make your old man proud," he said a minute later, laughing through the tears. "Oh, and the third thing. The third gift! I can't remember what it was..."

"There was nothing else in the bag," I said.

"Oh, I remember! It's a piece of advice. About the ACT or LET or whatever Charlie calls it-"

"-you know Charlie?"

"Oh, of course! Charlie's the one who told me you were here. I taught him a thousand years ago. It's a long story, and maybe next time I come to my senses I'll tell you. Anyways, the test! The only advice I can give you that always works is: 'don't sweat it.'"

"Oh, you silly old man, _everyone_ says that!" I said, and gave him a hug. I only regretted it a little when I felt his _entire skeleton_ through his clothing.

We talked for five more minutes, and then he told me that he had to go, because he didn't want me to see him come down off the medicine.

Before he left he got very serious. "If I never make it out of my mind again, will you do something for me?"

"Of course, but don't say that!" I said. I choked up again.

"Remember me as I was, as I wanted to be!" he said, and he left.

I sat on the bed and cried for longer than a grown vampire should. But I didn't sweat it so much after that.

* * *

The test was, honestly, nothing to sweat. We all sat in a classroom, where Doctor Foxham watched us to make sure we didn't cheat. There were a couple sheets of paper with questions, and a sheet where you filled in little circles with a pencil to represent your answers.

The funny thing was that Foxham had to keep reciting the same thing before each part of the test. He had it memorized by sheer repetition, I think.

"Turn to section (such and such). Do not begin until I signal. Do not look at or mark on other sections of the test at this time. Do not look at other students. Students who violate the rules will not be graded. Begin."

The second or third time, I looked up at him right after he'd finished saying it. He gave a sad little smile and nodded his head as if to say "I know, right."

There were five sections. Section one was math. I did the first five questions, but then they started throwing letters instead of numbers into the problems, so I skipped them. Section two was rearranging paragraphs. No, literally, rearranging paragraphs. The part where he calls her "your ladyship" is obviously after the part where he learns she's the Duchess. This was the easy part, I guess, the filler part, but I looked around the room discreetly from time to time and a lot of people looked panicked when we got to this part.

Then there was the "common sense" section, only they called it "logic." See, this is actually relevant to college, unlike the paragraph thing. The whole test could have been this. It started simple. "Fire is to water as X is to death." X is obviously "life." Alright, any child knows that. And then there were the trick questions. If I catch five fish and three asphyxiate in the air, how many do I have left? Five. But it made me stop and think. Then some were just mean. They'd show me a clock with no numbers and ask me what time the hands were showing. Took me ages to figure it out, and I had to use that watch from Simon. Foxham grinned when he saw me turning my arm at strange angles.

God, I love Simon.

So I only did alright on that section. Then there was a section where I basically had to read some dumb little stories and answer basic questions about them. I did great on that part. Then there were questions about science, which I also had to skip heavily.

But I see what they meant now about the test "separating the adults from the children." It's about common sense, not maturity. I guess I also see why Foxham thought it was hard "in a good way." " _Sheer plod,"_ he said several times, " _makes plough-down sillion shine._ " I have no idea what a sillion is, but I get the point. You have to work hard to make things shiny. I get it. I can work hard, I guess.

* * *

Well, then Leaf came to town the same evening and told me she was going to give me the "inside scoop" on college. Like, to her, college was about drinking and having sex. I do both of those just fine, probably more than she ever has, so there has to be more to it than _just_ that, but I sat in the little rooftop café and listened.

Ima tellda damn truth, diary, I kinda felt like I owed her for whatever things I might have done that night I can't really remember, when we both got high and ended up in bed. I sure as fupp owed her for shouting at her when she was on top of me. So I listened.

I also tried to convince her to lay off _Smartie Juice_ , whatever that is. Me, crowned queen of addicts (literally, I think the root-word of "vampire" is like, the Norwegian word for "deadhead fucking junkie" or something), trying to talk a casual user off of the stuff! But I felt like I had to be a good friend. Is that even being a good friend, if you think you have to?

Then she told me about all the secret ways to sneak in and out of the dorms. She took my hand and drew a little imaginary map using the lines of my palm as guides. It was a nice touch.

"One last thing," she said, as she was about to jump across the street to the next roof-top, "I have a piece of advice that's not about girls or guys or beer, believe it or not."

" _'Don't sweat it?'_ " I asked.

"I was going to say 'join the Knights.' You fight, right? They pay you."

She left, and I sat there in thought for a while. Like, so long that the artificial blood I'd bought from Ron James had gotten all cold and clotty by the time I actually went to drink it.

I thought about the Knights of the Lyceum. Now, I've been in six armies, broken lines of battle with my own axe while mounted on a demon horse and been everything from a private to a famous warlord. Girl's got to get paid, and armor makes great sun protection, so it's only natural I would have tried soldiering. I don't necessarily love it, but I love blood, I can regrow limbs and I'm good at fighting, so for about two centuries, mercenary work was my go-to job whenever I would run out of money.

If I joined the Knights while I was in college, I could have lots of spending money, be popular, and just generally, like, have my cake and eat it too. And if it wasn't what I consider a good unit, I could whip it into shape in no time. I make a good drill sergeant. It's the fact that most soldiers are men, y'know? There are threats that are just ridiculously fucking effective, and you never have to follow up.

But was that the point? Would I be learning if I was spending all my time soldiering? More importantly, would I get more mature from the experience if I spent all my time doing the same old thing from when I was younger?

I don't know. I don't know if I'll join up or even if I'll be eligible, but it's something I need to look into.

Oh, before I go, diary, I got my test results back this morning. I got a "23 and a half." They said it like it was good. It gets me in, at any rate.

 _[Author's note: Sorry for a slow installment. I'm just plotting this part out as I go. The next chapter will have fighting and start to get into the real plot.]_


	10. Chapter 9

(Sorry this took so long! I've had work, a bunch of writer's block, and then problems uploading to the site when I had finally finished this chapter. I hope you enjoy it. Things are accelerating towards actual plot now. Nearly everything in this chapter is to start a plot thread that's going to be important later.)

 **April 2nd, 2987**

 **Weather: all right**

 **Mood: good**

 **Music: White Stripes - Sister, Do You Know my Name?**

 ** _Dear Diary,_**

Classes started day before yesterday. I'd actually managed to look fairly decent. First was Ms. Donovan's Inglish 101 class. She still pisses me a little with the whole vampire-poser act, but I have an idea. She already thinks of me as a kindred spirit. One day, probably towards the end of the semester, she'll ask me about my makeup or something. I'm not usually wearing much or even any of it, but people make that mistake all the time with my complexion. She'll ask me "vat my seecret ees." Lots of people do. And I'll say "oh, my secret?"

And then I'll show my demon form to her. It'll be classic.

So her class was in one of the larger classrooms in the Arts and Letters Building. It's a wide windowless room with three big semi-circular desks that have swiveling chairs attached to them. There were so many people that we didn't have room to spread out. I had a nearly-human mutant who smelled like a dog breathing down my neck on the left (and I'm not being mean) and a little rabbit person sitting in the next seat at my right. The rabbit was hyperactive, constantly hitting her chair with her foot and interrupting the teacher with little tidbits she thought would be helpful. They weren't, usually.

Ms. Donovan didn't make us introduce ourselves, thank Glob. It's a simple class. We just write essays. I can handle that. Besides, if I choose not to do Inglish as my "major," this class is required anyways.

Next was Foxham's World Literature class. I was disappointed that he wasn't doing  
that thing he talked about in his office, _Fowst_ or whatever, not until next semester. It sounds like that story Dad used to tell, somehow. I'm so curious about it.

In Foxham's class, we have chairs and desks of our own. Too many of them, sometimes on top of each other. The classroom was where they store all the spare desks and chairs, apparently. He gets shafted like that a lot.

In this class, we're going to read a bumtch of novels and shit from before the war. I have to get those from the textbook shop tonight.

Foxham asked me to stay a minute after class.

"So I see you've decided to pursue Inglish, at least to begin with?" he said, making it a question.

"I'm trying a couple of things, actually. But I always did like to read."

"I'm glad. I already said this during the lecture, but do feel free to stop by my office hours if you have any trouble or want advice or anything."

"Thank you, doctor," I said.

"And, Abadeer, since you're taking my fall class, I might have a book to lend you, if I can ever find it. "

"You really don't have to do that," I said.

" _Oh, now_ ," he said. "Now run along or you'll be late!"

The next class was Health, over in an adjacent building. None of it applied to me, but it gave me time to think, so it wasn't a complete loss. No one called on me or asked me to do anything, which was nice.

Then came "Pre-algebra," in yet another building. This is that kind of math that fucked me up on the entrance test, where they use letters to stand for numbers. We didn't actually do any on the first day, which was good, because all I could think about was running over to the garrison to apply for knighthood.

After math class, at about four-fifty, I opened my parasol, buttoned my shirt-cuffs, and stepped out into the western quadrangle. This is a big grassy field bordered by ancient trees, among which I picked out a sandalwood that must have been planted when I was something like young, criscrossed by where sentimental jackasses have carved their girlies' names into it. Being immortal gives you an appreciation for these things, I guess. But fuck, whatever gives it meaning to them. I just wish they weren't carving in it.

I found that I had a little magic left to float on, so I went up in the air a little ways and let the sound of fencing carry me over to the garrison, on the other side of a couple of buildings, and next to the chapel. It's a smallish building like a castle keep, and inside a massive, open door, two roughly human-shaped beings in armor were having it out with flaming swords on an indoor fencing pitch.

I wasn't lied to, these swords had some deep magic on them. I don't mean uncontrollably flaming like a big log you just pulled out of a fire, but a low, hot blue flame that made a deep rushing sound when they swung them.

And the armor was fantastic too, old vanadium-steel plate armor from the Imperium of Baltimore or a damn good replica, painted dust-white and worn over newish, well-made leather jerkins. The shields had a red field and an open book that said " _tredecim luces lucentes in saeclo tenebroso._ " I knew some of those words, once upon a time. My memory is good, but over hundreds of years and dozens of battles with the stuff...

I noted that one of the fighters had spurs on, and one did not. That's familiar enough-they have some kind of system of earning your rank. Out in Iowa about seven centuries ago, the King would give you your spurs and make you a full Knight after your first battle, or if you beat him in a duel... we had a problem with people buying their knighthoods and getting away with it because their families were old and rich, though. It's likely enough the same deal here on both counts.

The one with spurs scored a beautiful touch on his opponent. "Game over," he said, in a thundering voice. He'd apparently seen me, because he took off his helm, revealing a scaly green face, and said "another candidate! Come in!" The other fighter slinked away.

I floated into the fencing room and touched down.

He was one of those things... what did Simon call them? _"Frap boys?"_ His armor had three runes painted on one side of the breastplate, and even I know what that means. He belongs to one of these three or four "houses" that each have a runic name. They're like very tame street gangs, but they usually claim to be running the place. Simon thought they were morons.

He sat down behind a desk next to the pitch and put his heels up, which took some doing in spurs.

"Well, bitch, you're here to try out for one of the spots. Don't tell me I'm right, I know I am," he said.

I hated him immediately. "So, like, do I get to fight you now or is there some dumb _phazing_ or whatever first?"

"Whoah, like, you got to pay to fight Sir Julian," he said, putting way too much emphasis on the S in 'sir.' Forked tongue, I guess.

"How much? And if I win do I get a spot?"

"One hundred silver, and yeah, maybe, bitch. But you won't. You're skinny. You'll tire quick and I'll get three strikes in before you land one."

"So, are you like, the boss around here."

"Pretty much."

 _"No,"_ a much older voice behind him said. A very human-looking mutant man with three eyes and long white hair and beard stepped out from a side door into the fencing room. He wore a chainmail shirt and old-fashioned tights. "Julian," he chuckled, "I said try out candidates while I was taking coffee. I didn't say you could have my job."

The frap boy got up sheepishly and the three-eyed man sat down.

"Name?" the man said.

"Abadeer, Marceline Vetiver." For some reason, they always want you to say it like that for official purposes.

He leafed through some files. "Ah, yes. Abadeer... daughter of Hunson, am I correct?"

"Y..yeah."

"He tried out back in his day. Wasn't very good!" the man chuckled. He never spoke, he chuckled. "But you, you sound to be a different story. Administration is paying half your fee, given your combat record."

 _Wait, my father came here?_ I thought. "You know my record?"

"A partial combat history was sent up when we requested your immunization records, apparently. From Candy Kingdom, correct?"

"Yeah. Do I still have to fight Julian?"

" _Sir Julian_ ," the snake-man interjected. The old man swung around and glared at him with three eyes.

"No, you have a harder task. You must fight _me_ ," the old man said, not chuckling.

"Why do I get the feeling you've been doing this for as long as I have?"

"Oh, I'm a few decades younger, Ms. Abadeer. Isn't that something?" he chuckled. "But yes, I'd suspect we've both been swinging a sword about nine hundred years now, isn't that right?" he said, chuckling again heartily.

"Yeah."

So I paid him two pieces of gold, which was still fifty silver, last I checked. He picked one up and said "give me the rest if you lose. This is going to be a challenge, and it's not every day I get one."

So then Julian, clearly futting _pistaf,_ takes me to the armory in stony silence and helps me find some armor that fit. Thing about the Baltimore Imperium was, they weren't sexist. Not only did you have women fighting, you had armor for women that wasn't... y'know... endowed. If you take a metal breastplate and hammer it out on either side like you see women wearing in the movies, it becomes really ineffective as armor. The breast-plate _should_ have depth, so a woman can actually fit in it, but it should be smooth all the way across or it'll break right in two if someone hits it with a mace. Ideally, it shouldn't look _that_ different from men's armor.

And I think it _was_ men's size 1 1/5 armor that I ended up wearing when I came back downstairs to face the old knight. It was a bit tall for me, but I know how to compensate. Julian put a sword in my hands and muttered something like "g'luck, bitch. Three strikes wins."

So I faced the old man across the pitch. He'd put on armor while I'd been gone, and now he waited with a flaming sword. I saluted him in the old Iowa way, three flourishes and then a Roman salute. It flamed when I held it up for the last part.

He saluted me another way, but just as dignified, like he was doing the old Christian thing (crossing yourself?) except with his sword, finishing up with a Roman salute.

We _charged_. I brought my sword around into the top left quadrant and though I'd hit him before he could parry.

Like lightning, he blocked it, hard enough to make my sword recoil in my hand. Then he came up with a fucking fantastic riposte, swinging sharply down to catch my left leg.

I caught it, and gave up a little ground to put both swords between us.

He wrestled with me, trying to get his sword around to riposte effectively, but I kept it dead in front of him.

This seemed to go one for a while. I noticed that he never blinked with his third eye. I mean the one on his forehead.

Then I jumped up in the air and made a sudden feint. He tried to strike me in the right side, and I was able to parry and riposte. I got the first strike in to his left shoulder.

"Good, good," he chuckled. "Record that, Julian."

We each backed off a pace and then re-engaged. I decided to try to disarm him, because I'm nearly sure I'd win by default if I did.

I caught his sword with mine in the middle of his swing and tried to wrench it from his hand to one side.

He laughed, and let go with his right hand, and kept the sword in his left. He got in two good strikes while I tried for a good position to try again. I eventually stopped trying to disarm him and got in one more strike.

So it came down to this. Like, the moment of truth, I guess.

We each backed off and then re-engaged.

And I got him with a sudden strike to the lower left abdomen.

Wait, what? I thought. He let me win, of course. I was a little disappointed.

We each took off our helmets. He flipped me the gold coin I paid him.

"No," I said. "You already waived half." I flipped it back.

"Didn't I say double or nothing? Maybe I didn't."

So then he took me up to his office. It was, like, a room with two chairs, a low table, and some incense burning, but he called it his office.

"Well, you've got one of the qualifications down pat," he said. "I let you win, of course, because of my knee. I could have fought you forever and either of us might have won, but I'd be in a wheel-chair for weeks."

"So what are the other qualifications?" I asked.

"After your first semester, 3.00 GPA or better, and you have to take orders well."

"From Julian?"

He chuckled. "From someone worse, maybe. Or not. Certainly not from him, he's what you'll be if you comission, and people like him don't promote."

"No, I wouldn't imagine they do. I never promoted anyone like him if I could help it."

"Nor me. But given your prior experience, are you sure you're alright being a grunt? There are thirteen of us and you start practically at the bottom, with Julian and one other. That can't be easy."

"No, I never learned it. Like, that's why it's important, Sir..."

"Howell."

"Sir Howell. I need to learn to take orders now or I guess I never will." It was hard to say.

He chuckled.

Then he got out a piece of paper and handed it to me. "Think about it for forty-eight hours and come back to me."

I took off the armor in the armory, and I noticed that Julian's silence had less of an edge on it.

* * *

So I'm somehow _still_ not sure. Why wouldn't I join the Knights? I didn't realize it at the time, but there was no question of _other candidates_ when I talked to Howell in his office. He'd chosen me for the spot, but had I chosen?

I'd get payed. That's good. I might die, and I might have to take orders from an idiot. Eh, that's not great.

Maybe this is why I'm not an adult. I hesitate entirely too much. Or do adults hesitate more? _Ugggghhhhhh!_

* * *

So I went to see Foxham. He had tea ready, and he had that book for me. It was called " _Doctor Faustus_."

"Since you showed such interest in _Faust_ , I thought I might let you prepare ahead of time for my fall class. This is the play that inspired the other play I quoted to you. You might find it very interesting."

"No, Doctor, I can't..."

"Of course you can't. It's against the rules. Do so anyways," he said. "I know a little of your heritage, Ms. Abadeer, and these things interest you for a reason."

"Does everyone here know my dad?"

"Listen," he said in a hushed there are things we're not supposed to talk about. Your dad, and Charlie... um... I can't."

"I understand. I'll find out eventually, I suppose," I said.

"You do that," he said, and looked at me sympathetically.

"Hey, doc," I said. "Here on the book it has a little shield with three books that say ' _veritas_.' That means truth, right?"

"Yeah. It's Latin. It's the coat of arms for Harvard, one of the great universities from before the war. The Knights' coat of arms is based on it."

"That's what I was about to ask," I said. "What does that say in Latin?"

" _Tredecim luces lucentes_ and all that? Erm, how would I render that? 'Thirteen lights burning in a dark age?' 'Thirteen shining beacons...?'"

"Oh, wow. That's... kickass. Well, thanks for lending me this," I said, holding up the book.

Would it be childish to say I finally decided to join the Knights partly because of their cool motto or slogan... deal? Well, I'm here to grow up, and it's definitely a work in progress. I'm joining.

* * *

So I've had one day off and one day of regular classes since then. I did turn in my papers at the garrison, but I haven't had to report for training yet, and nothing much has happened in class. The rooming situation... well, I'm free to sleep either at the garrison or at the dorm room the school assigned me. Both are futting problematic.

My roomate in the dorm room has personality-way the flip too much of it. I don't know what kind of mutant she is. She looks human, but not from any of the tribes I used to know, like Tom and Finn's people or those dudes with the face-paint. Maybe she's a fluke.

She's just moved in and already has all these posters up-some of them have packs of wolves running by moonlight, some of them have boy bands, and she covered nearly every surface on her side of the room, including the ceiling. Aight, that's all forgivable. I had that phase.

But she talks my ear off. Boy bands, boy bands, boyfriends, soap operas... it never ends.

I'm lying on my back thinking about homework (not doing it, but thinking about it), and trying not to seem impolite, while she's going on about this, that and the other.

Eventually, as if finally tired of her own voice, she started asking me questions. She wanted to know what bands I'm in to-so I listed them in no particular order-the Dead, the Stripes, Nirvana, the Big Fuckers, Red Room, Bauhaus, Joni Mitchell...

And she looked at me as if to say _who the hell are they?_ Then she says "Sorry, girl, you're _weird_."

Now listen. There's "weird" and there's "weird." And there's also "weeeeird" and " _weird._ " There's a lot of them, in fact. I can wear plain old "weird." It looks pretty damn good on me. But there's one particular intonation that certain young people put on that word. It means "outside my comfort zone" or maybe what Lemondude means when he says "unacceptable." Exactly what Lemondude means, in fact.

(It _is_ fun to say the way he does. He has a better soprano range than I do, though.)

And it's what these teens say when you step outside a fairly narrow range of common experience and culture. And if they apply it to _you_ , not something you like, there's seldom any recovering from it. You're uncanny, outside the limits and you don't get another chance.

Look, I've hung out with young people for a thousand years, and they all say it. Sometimes the word is different, but the intonation is the same. I used to say it myself, before I realized how big the world is and how many hats I'd worn.

So no, it's not just that Melissa Bankley (that's her name) is a chatterbox. It's that it took her all of one conversation to start judging the things I like, and that's one step away from judging _me_. Either one might be easier to swallow, but the two together? Not only do I know that the person on the other bed is judging me, I'm constantly reminded that she's there, and I have to _listen to her._

Then there's the situation at the garrison. I slept there last night. We have bunkbeds, and I have to bunk under Herr Julian.

Dillemma of a lifetime, really.


	11. Chapter 10

**[Author's note: As a faithful reader and reviewer brought to my attention, there's been some confusion. The character "Sir Susan," introduced below, was never intended to be the same character as Susan Strong. The entire Islands series and Susan along with it just dropped out of my head when I was writing my series outline, apparently. Sorry for any confusion, and I hope you enjoy the fic.]**

 **April 4, 2987:**

 **Weather: Nice and drenched**  
 **Mood: improving**  
 **Music: Leonard Cohen - Teachers**

 **Dear Diary,**

Well, this is going to be a long one. I actually went on a mission for the Knights! It involved an airplane, magical books, and I actually managed to fight a ghost for the first time since I've been a vampire... Ok, let me get my facts straight and tell it in order...

 _I woke up, the room was bare; I didn't see her anywhere..._

Wait, that's a song, I can't use that.

It's true, though. One good thing about the dorm room is, Melissa leaves way earlier than I do in the morning. Her first class is at eight and I guess she works out first. It almost made up for listening to her on the phone with Haden from eight to eleven at night. And I only heard his name at the very end of the phonecall, because she makes up a new, sugary pet-name every time she'd've had to call him by name.

Am I like that when _I'm_ in love? I'll have to think back.

So I got up yesterday, alone in the dorm room. I'd managed to sleep five hours, which is as much as I've slept at once in a year. Then I had, by my standards, a futting luxurious breakfast: A whole tube of red watercolour paint! No, really, it's not as bad as it sounds. It's Fenniman's patent red iron oxide no. 14, and it has a very deep, almost crimson flavor, and when I'm done it's still usable-as white paint, of course.

Then I threw on some flannel and jeans that I hadn't actually worn yet since leaving home, for a change. I fished around for my portable clippers in the luggage, and when I finally found them, I took some chunks out of my hair at the sides. It'll look funny tomorrow and I'll have long hair again the next day, if I don't do something else with it, but today it'll look badass.

That's one thing I don't miss about _before_ : bad haircuts. Back then it took a full year to get my hair shoulder-length if I'd cut it short, and by that time I was usually ready to have it short again. And when I cut it, I'd want it long, and so on and so on. And that's not even mentioning the _bad_ haircuts. Decades after the war, even finding another person who could hold scissors only happened once in a while, and mirrors were kind of at a premium too. Imagine me with a bob-cut, diary. Actually, I described it to you pretty damn well in volume three. What is this now, volume 78?

But enough griping. Class was very interesting, for a change. I've already learned a few things about the Old World that I never knew. Most people didn't believe in magic? This was news to me. I must have seen Mom summon Dad a hundred times before I was five. Not that he ever stayed long.

But Foxham is good at painting these mental pictures of the Old World, and he goes off on tangents about history a lot when he probably should be teaching us about the books we're reading. Toward the forty-five minute mark, he was describing a place in our home city (mine and his), and I quote:

 _"There it was, nestled among unassuming neighborhoods, ocasionally shadowed by the massive concrete towers that the humans built when they'd run out of ground. It had been another poor neighborhood in its time, but it became a monument to this man, and to his dream. The home where he was born and lived was a museum, the church he preached at his entire adult life was a museum, and his tomb was a shrine. I've seen the ruins myself._

 _"And that city-crowded though it was with cars and smoke and the roar of aeroplanes, and even as racism ran rampant in the streets, there was a coal of equality burning in that city. Because he and his millions had a dream that... how did he put it? '...that every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain...'"_

It's at this point that someone interrupted Foxham to ask what "racism" was. Actually, they'd been interrupting for several minutes, but it was then that he finally stopped to ask them what they were "on about."

He tried to explain and the student skillfully didn't understand. This went on for some time. They all understand prejudice. They're a dozen different species, with ancient rivalries and all that mess. They've experienced prejudice from both sides, every single one of them. But that a species could do it to itself? The idea offends them because it's so outside their experience. By the time they were done discussing it, it was the end of the period.

Me and Mom never talked about racism before she died. I think I was too young in her eyes for her to tell me about these things. I'd already been to the Nightosphere and seen all kinds of jacked-up shit, but Dad never told her that, and he made me promise not to tell either.

Mom had experienced racism, though, for sure. Me, I put up with species prejudice, being a vamp, and I've done _plenty_ to earn it, don't get me wrong. That doesn't make it fair, really, but it somehow makes it hurt a little less. Mom? Some people would have treated her differently because of what continent her ancestors were from, and how basic natural selection colored their skin there. How does that even feel?

And unlike the students, who operate on a "weasels stick together" level, it doesn't surprise me. Every time a new form of sentient life crawls out of the swamp, it starts being douchey to everyone almost immediately. I've been around for it at least twelve times. It amazes me how Bonnie gained sentience and was immediately almost sociopathically _good._ That's _"good"_ as she understands it, with about sixteen pairs of quotation marks around it, but even that is still an improvement on most species.

Glob, what did Bonnie do to me? I sound like I'm in love.

So class was interesting. Health was boring, math was difficult, but the other two were _interesting_. Ms. Donovan handed out our first essay assignment, and when someone complained about the deadline, she said she "thrives on our salty, salty tears." That's actually pretty funny. I might say it sometime to like... Jake, or somebody.

After class, it was time for training. I went to the garrison via an underground passage from the math building, that I _don't_ think I'm supposed to know about. It was bright out yesterday, and I didn't want to burn anything before I got there. I'm not sure how well I heal right now. Probably pretty well; I got five hours of sleep in, right? But I'm not pushing my luck.

I came up through a hidden hatch in the fencing room. Julian the magic dragon glared at me and then told me I was five minute late. My Timex showed me _three_ minutes late, but _whatever_. Sir Howell led me into an empty classroom in the garrison building and introduced me to my new training partner, Sir Sue. She's pretty cool, I guess, but she doesn't let on much. She's human-ish, one of those mutants who can't make hair follicles, but I think if she had hair she'd have it short. Her eyebrows are painted-on, and the little finger of each gauntlet hangs empty, but otherwise, she could pass for human.

And she's tall. She wears armor that was clearly made for a good-sized man, and wears it well. Her effortless motions while wearing it tell me she's pretty muscular too, but I've only seen her in armor.

"I'm in charge of your initial evaluation, Probational Knight Abadeer," she said, after Sir Howell had left. "Depending on your performance, you may be given an additional rank upon comissioning."

"Alright, what's on this evaluation?"

"There's an abandoned library over in the Great Wastes. It has books the professors need. There is an obstacle which blocks easy access. You will fight it, I will observe."

"An obstacle?"

"Patience, Ms. Abadeer. As Sir Howell says, patience is a knightly virtue," she said, but somehow it didn't sound _that_ judging. Maybe it _was_ just a platitude.

"Aight. How do we get to the Wastes?"

"We fly. I've managed to book the Lyceum's light aircraft for this operation. I will pilot it."

Alright, so I was starting to think that maybe Sir Susan isn't just playing frosty with me. I was beginning to wonder if she was just like that, all unemotional and distant. Wooden, too. But fuck, an aircraft? Like a plane? I hadn't seen one in centuries.

I got into my permanent armor, the suit I'm supposed to keep for my whole stay here. It's a womens' size 2, and it fits a little better than the suit I wore to fight Sir Howell. The helmet is new to me, though. I'd never worn anything like it, either in Iowa or the Second Mutant Army. It's a frog-mouth, which is my least favorite kind of helm, but has very nicely made cushioning, unlike nearly every other helmet ever, and it has a radio intercom. It felt nice to strap on one of the famous swords, too. I still haven't figured out how it makes the blue flames. Pure fucking magic, I suppose.

Then Sue took me down another underground passage, which seemed to go on for a long time, and then up a flight of stairs into a little hangar. There it was, a small yellow airplane, painfully slender and beautiful, like a chicken hawk I once killed for its blood in a moment of desperation. It had a multi-faceted glass cage for a cockpit that looked barely big enough to hold two people, let alone the two of us in armor. It looked to be in good shape, but the engine was clearly a replacement, because the housing for it looked crudely welded on.

"Prewar, from Europe." Sue muttered, when she noticed just how much I was admiring it. "It lands on the spot in a medium headwind, like a kestrel. In a heavy headwind we might actually land backward."

"They made some good things before the war," I said, still staring at it.

"Including yourself, I suppose. Not self-serving?"

I did a double-take. "You know?"

"I do. Let's begin."

She opened the cockpit and motioned for me to get in first. I put on my helmet, because I knew we'd be in sunlight in a minute. Sue put hers on too, and only once I was inside the plane did I see why. There would have been no place to set it down in the tiny cockpit. We had to shove our shields, swords and packs awkwardly behind the seats.

"So, what's a kestrel?" I asked, as I strapped in.

I somehow think she half-smiled inside her helmet. "You've seen 'em," she said, sounding for only the second time like a Glob-damn living being and not some kind of robot. "Little falcons that hover in a headwind. I like to call the plane that."

"So what else do you like to do?" I said. It sounded less futting awkward in my head.

"Mostly this," she said, and started flipping switches on the overhead panels. A few seconds later she started the engine, which sputtered and then got loud. On cue, someone ran out in front of us and pulled a lever, and the hangar door opened. The sun hung low in the sky directly ahead, just beginning to turn red. I squinted. We began to roll forward.

Did I freaking say you could land airplanes on the castles walls of the Lyceum campus? I fucking called it. Somehow in all that underground mess, we'd climbed up a flight of stairs inside the wall and come out in a hangar adjacent to the main gatehouse. The hangar door faced out on a runway on top of the wall.

We ran along the wall a mere two hundred feet before the creaky wheels left the ground. Sue pulled back on the steering thing, and we were going upstairs like a bat.

 _Literally_. I do it all the time when I have the energy.

And we were soaring over the mountains a moment later.

"Hey, is there anything I need to do before we get there?" I asked.

"Just keep your strength up. The foe is... well, let's just say that there's a fail rate of forty percent."

I managed to plug my MePod into the helmet intercom so that it'd play over my headphones. I put on Pink Floyd, that mega-epic that they called _Echoes_ , but which should be called, like, _The Albatross_ or something. I once read in an ancient magazine that they actually made more than just the two albums. I'd love to find those someday.

Beneath us the mountains rolled away. Maps call them the Northern Appalachians, or at least, the old ones do. They have about a thousand names now.

In my headphones, Dave Gilmour was singing about life coming into existence deep in the ocean. And then in one of those haiku moments, the point where two images come together and the meeting casts new light on both, he switched to a new image: two strangers meet in the night and recognize themselves in each other. Is he saying that strangers falling in love at first sight is like chemicals randomly joining together on the ocean floor to create life, or vice versa? Neither or both. Neither and both. That's why it's brilliant. It's also why I love haiku-all the good ones do that.

And for only the second time in how many decades, I felt the perfect moment. I was floating over beautiful scenery in an airplane, with a person I like, as much as I don't know her that well, listening to, like, one of the greatest songs in history. _What could tarnish this moment?_ I might have thought. Because I'm a real schmuck...

"So what's this music we're listening to?" Susan asks.

 _Fuck, I had it set to broadcast_. I felt embarrased, and if I'd fed recently, I would have blushed like a fupping teenage boy from one of those Japanese shows. I _jerked_ the headphone wire out of my helmet. " _I'm sorry, I didn't know you could hear it too!_ " I said, louder than I'd meant to.

There were about ten seconds of silence that could be cut with a knife.

Then I had a terrible thought. Maybe she'd been enjoying it. _Fuck, I don't know what to do!_

Then a voice came into my head. Not one of those whispering voices like you hear when you're strung out or sleep-deprived or just nucking futz, the ones that, like, tell you to destroy things; it was a calm, wise voice that always gave good advice.

 _"Use your words,"_ Simon had said, more than nine hundred years ago.

"Um... Sir Sue?"

"Yes."

"I didn't know you could hear that. Do you... do you want me to put it back on?"

"Yes, please," she said. "I liked it."

And that was that. I've never felt like a stranger around Sue since then. But I felt dumb for making a big awkward deal about nothing. Glob, I _am_ going to be this way forever.

So that was day one of the mission. We sailed over the mountains and the desert well into the night, and landed around midnight. Then the trek began...

I'm not going to lie to you, this was the most bored I'd been in a decade. The Great Wastes are pretty flat and featureless. We walked over sand and scattered grass for four hours.

The ancient city drew in sight about two in the morning. Walking all that way at night with armor and a heavy pack was hard enough for me and probably harder for her, and I asked if we should camp for the night. So we set up our little pup-tent and laid down in armor as a chill wind blew through the flaps. I don't think either of us slept that much. She was freezing, I have a condition, and there was a coyote howling not fupping far enough away.

But hey, misery loves company.

In the morning, I got up to find her cooking breakfast for one in a little lightweight stewpot. We'd apparently stumbled into a junkyard on the edge of the city the night before. Mountains of twisted wreckage stood here and there, and through a gap in the junk I could see a well-preserved city-street.

If we'd pitched our tent a little to the right, we'd have been out of the wind, dammit. The little prairie chicken she'd killed with a slingshot was barely mutated, almost certainly not a person, but it was small and she hadn't been able to get much meat off it for herself. She'd broken the bones and was trying to make broth. When she noticed I was up, she closed a little green book, laid aside the stick she'd been stirring her soup with, and handed me a plastic bag full of chicken blood.

It was _good._ I drank half of it and poured the rest down my canteen with a little water left in it to make it go farther. Sue doesn't naturally communicate much, but she's a very good person.

And then we were ambushed by the Coyote Men. They'd snuck up on us while we were eating. I drew my sword, and one of the twisted, semi-erect beasts laughed a terrible laugh. There were ten in all, and they had me surrounded. I say "me," because Sue had disappeared and I couldn't see her anywhere. She'd shoved the book in my hand, and I shoved it in my bag.

I ran towards the one that smelled like the alpha. Don't ask me how I know what that smells like. I had my sword in both hands, pointing down, and went to plunge it down the soft part between his neck and clavicle. I heard a creaking sound, and at once me and the Alpha looked over to see a massive landslide of car-parts coming towards us.

Meanwhile in the present, it's time for me to get to that extra-credit seminar, so I'll write the rest down later today.

(To be continued.)


	12. Chapter 11

[And now, the conclusion. I would have finished this a month ago, but for mid-semester papers and all like that. Sorry!]

Whew, that seminar was boring as fupp.

So there we were, me and J.D. (That's the Alpha of the coyote-man pack we ran into.) I was about to kill him, he was about to kill me. I was pretty well armed and armored, and I could have spent all morning fighting the whole pack and _might_ have won, but they could have just as easily over-whelmed me and torn me limb-from-limb.

Wasteland skirmishes, by the way, are a lot like snowflakes-every one is unique, but most aren't interesting to tell about. But it never got to the skirmish-ing part, because Sir Sue had an _interesting_ plan. I'd even say a _weird_ plan, but that word has a bad aftertaste right now. A _weak_ plan, as that one alien girl used to say...

She snuck off, using some kind of ninja skills that run in her family. Sneaking isn't easy when you're wearing plate armor, even the vanadium-steel kind, so I, like, give her major points for that aspect. Then she knocked over a big pile of scraps in the direction of the Alpha. Unfortunately, I had just run towards the Alpha, and anyways, the landslide was placed so that it would cut off our retreat.

A symbolic, harmless Stevie Nicks-style landslide, this weren't. (That's the past tense of "ain't", by the way. I ain't- I weren't- I ain't done been. My mother would legitimately pop me in the lip if she heard me talking like that.)

So in that split second, I looked at the mountain of scrap metal coming towards me, then at my enemy. I saw a new light in his eyes, a rather ordinary, decent, regular-person kinda light. So instead of just running, I grabbed him under his arms and made like Tom Petty in _Learning to Fly._

Meaning I jumped straight up in the air about ten feet. So really, not a great analogy.

I'd expected that I wouldn't have the energy to fly. It was worth a try, and I might have been able to survive being crushed by the scrap metal, so it wasn't entirely stupid. Instead, the expected weight was nowhere, and I managed to lift me and the coyote-man into the air effortlessly. Scrap metal ran under our feet like a river.

When the landslide had stopped, there was Sir Sue, looking sheepish behind where the pile of scrap had been. How did she look sheepish while wearing a closed-face helmet? It's all in the shoulders.

So I set the big old idiot down on level ground. Oh, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Now, in an old-fashioned story, he'd swear his life to me because I'd saved him. In a modern story, he'd try to kill me, because, like, the scorpion and the fox, right? _Re-uh-lism._

This is real life, so it had to be something way the hell stranger than either, right?

"Thou art she!" he yelled, while grinning as sincerely as a predator can-literally ear to ear, too.

"I be-eth the who, now?" I'd had experience with that kind of talk before. It's tiring.

"Thou art kin to King Simon!"

" _You_ know Simon?"

He roared giddily in my face. "Please, thou art a member of our pack now! Thou mayst, no, thou _SHOULDST_ call me "thou!" Thy scent was preserved with many others in our _ANCIENT_ records from the days of _CHAOS_! We all know it!"

"Wait, what? And please, less shouting."

He brought it back home for a second. "Art thou not Marcya Semyonovna Petrikova, heir to King Simon?"

"Simon was my..." I let the natural word come out, which isn't easy when you've been catching yourself for hundreds of years. "...my dad, yeah. I didn't know he made up one of those Russian names for me, too."

He started barking again. "There will be a feast this night! It will be _great! GRAND!_ And it will be for _thee!_ "

 _Oh, jeez, I have to say no_ , I thought.

"I, th-th-thy princess,"-I said, with great reluctance, hoping that was the right word-"am unfortunately here on business. However, I can accept your offer of a feast-" I looked at Sue, and she shrugged again; "-soonish?"

"We will await that day in honour, our Queen." _Queen, that was it,_ I thought. _Well, that's nothing new._

* * *

So I thought that the fun part of our journey was over. Hoo boy, I was wrong. Well, Sir Sue took off her helmet and cautiously approached where J.D. and I were talking. Because she's part of "my pack," J.D. had to formally give her permission to use those old-fashioned pronouns, the "thee" and "thou" and all that. It's how they show that they trust someone, I guess. Culture, dude.

Then Sue let it slip that we were going to the _haunted library._

Two things happened: For one, as soon as it sunk in that the "obstacle" was a ghost, my guts felt like ice, because I _can't fight_ ghosts. It's one of the _vampire things_ , and not one of the made-up and stupid ones like not entering a house uninvited.

It boils down to this: I literally can't harm a ghost with any physical weapon. It's like, I don't have an A.T. field or something. No, that's stupid, this is real life, not _Evangelion_. At any rate, I don't have a _soul_ , so I'm powerless to fight creatures that are made out of pure soul. A witch explained it to me once.

But they can harm me _plenty_ , so it's usually a losing fight.

The second thing was that J.D. got _excited_. And I thought he'd been shouting _before_. He ran around wagging his crooked tail, shouting "We will hunt with you! Ye willt be our _COMPANIONS of the_ _ **HUNT**_!"

So we had to let J.D. come with us. His pack were creeping back out, because they'd scattered after the landslide, and they formed a sort of loose crowd around us as we left the junkyard.

The city, whose name escapes me, was like any Middle-American ruins, but Sue told me that she was doing her honors thesis on urban archaeology, and kept pointing out things I'd never noticed about these places. Those poles at the street-corners? They used to have these things called "traffic lights" suspended from wires at the top, that told you when it was safe to drive. I might have seen something like that once, but it's been so long ago...

But as we walked towards the end of town that had the library, I had to own up to the fact that I, like, couldn't perform our mission.

"Oh, you expected to fight it with your sword?" she said. "I'm sorry, I gave you the wrong idea. With a supernatural foe like this, we always use magic."

"I um... like, I can do all the standard vampire things, necromancy and conjuring and all that, but I don't actually know any offensive magic. I mostly win fights by turning into a giant wolf or by sneaking around and shanking the guy in the back."

I barely noticed that J.D. enthusiastically approved of what I was saying.

"You're starting at the beginning," Sue said. "It's to be expected." She handed me a thin ancient-looking black book with gold letters on the cover: "CODEX MAGICARUM CARLI."

"Be careful with it," she said, "I think that's one of the older copies; maybe even the first one. We haven't gotten around to making more of them in ages. There's this attrition, you understand. People don't like to give them back."

I rubbed my finger over the letters. "CODEX MAGICARUM CARLI," I muttered under my breath. Hell, even I know that means something like " _Carl's Magic Book._ " And here's the problem: magic books are usually 99 percent _bunk._ I've read a bunch of them, and usually they're just a mess of philosophy and shit and not a single real, useable spell. _The Enchiridion,_ the _Book of Zohar_ , _White Stains_ , the _Necronomicon_ (all three of them)... it's always the same.

But then I opened it. And there was written, in clear handwriting quite like mine, simple and clear instructions for making a fireball with your mind. And that was the _first page_. This was the _real shit._

"Sue, this is incredible," I said.

"It's just the basic one, too," she said. "Wait until you read _Necromancy For Non-Majors_. We get in trouble with the Wizards for maintaining our own magic library, but Sir Howell says, and I quote, 'it's totally cool, man, _chill_.' Besides, the Master likes him. I think they used to date."

That is an image I will never have out of my head. Giant muppet gorilla-man slash three-eyed zen-master dude. It's fucking great. I wonder what they talked about...

* * *

So we got to the library at noon.

I actually had to take my helmet off and use a little folding parasol, because it was getting hot in there, but we made it there somehow. I spent most of the walk learning the basic spells, which are easy as fuck. I was still nervous, thinking about fighting a _ghost_. It's been the one thing that I just don't _do_.

But hell, it was day, and ghosts are weak before nightfall. Also, I'd just learned this cool magic arrow spell that's meant specially for the undead, and Sue had reluctantly agreed to let J.D.'s pack help out, as long as I did most of the work.

I didn't feel like I needed to be nervous, I just _was_.

The library was a tall, squarish building with ton and tons of windows, some shattered. Sue had keys to the massive, old-fashioned Yale padlocks that held the main door shut.

"Not that it's necessary," she said. "Nobody in the city will go near it."

"We are not afraid!" bellowed J.D. "We just think we will die if we go in there! _Not afraid_!"

"You don't have to come with us," I said.

The effect was massive. J.D. started jumping up and down like some kind of... weird puppy that likes to jump up and down. " _We must follow the queen!_ " he bellowed, and his pack started barking "the queen, the queen!"

 _Jeez, these people aren't going to take it well when I leave, are they?_ I thought.

Inside, it was pretty typical. There was a receptionist's desk, a few empty bookshelves, and a grand staircase leading up to the second level. Dust blanketed the ground, except a six-month-old track leading to the staircase, which, unless I've gone totally blind, was made by two people, pulling a small cart, round-trip. One of them had a limp on the way back. I told Sue as much.

She had her helmet off by then, and she like, gave me a _look_. "Don't get cold feet," she said, but I think she was more jealous that I have tracksense. It's not even a vampire thing. I learned it from one of the last five Native Americans in the world.

We all went up the stairs, and found ourselves in a dark, long area with tons of bookshelves, all about half-full. We crossed this room and entered an even darker corridor. I guess the dogs hung back for whatever reason, but we didn't really care enough to notice, or at least, I didn't.

"You might want to put your helmet on and get ready for battle," Sue said. "When we encounter the ghost, I'll run past it and collect the books we need while you distract it."

" _That's_ the plan?"

"Yes, what else would it be?"

Anyways, I put on my helmet and rested my hand on the sword-hilt. I imagined that I was feeling like Saint George of Ingland felt before he fought that dinosaur and founded the Yoo-Kay.

We went a little further down the corridor.

 _And suddenly it was roaring in my face._ We'd walked right up on it, because it was transparent and the sunlight was only barely filtering into where we were. It was a ghost with a beard and some kind of skirt, barely five feet from me, and it was swinging a ghostly battle-axe.

"Och! I will nay allow talking in this library," he barked with a Scottish accent.

 _Okay,_ I thought, _so it's a Scottish librarian ghost. Cool_.

So I fired the magic arrow spell, and the damn thing dodged it. I found myself thinking momentarily of Leaf. What the dip does she do if things dodge her arrows? I'm a sword-and-axe person, so I'm out of my depth.

I immediately had to dodge the ghost's axe, which he swung sidearm like a total amateur.

I came back up and fired again. He was barreling at me full speed, so he had no time to dodge. It made a hole through him, which seemed to hurt, but didn't re-kill him.

"Och! I keep this library alive after the war, I work my fingers to the bone and don't even stop when I'm _dead_ , and this is how ye thank me?"

"What?" I asked, doging another sloppy axe swing.

"Ye knights," he said, pronouncing the "k", "always coming and stealing my books! I will nae hae nae more of it! You die now!"

"I'm new to this. I'm just-" I said, and I paused to mutter the last word of the spell that would coat my hands in magic fire, "-I'm just paying my tuition." I got inside his swinging range and punched him in the throat with a flaming fist, which seemed to hurt a lot, naturally.

"Ye hypocrite! Ye are in education and ye do nae respect the library," he shouted, throwing down his axe, which vanished, and balling up his fists.

"I'm still-" _dodge_ "-I'm still working some things _out_!" I said, getting him with a right hook as I said the last word.

"Well, chew on this, mate!" He swung and I had to dodge. "I would hae given ye the gawdamn books a century ago if ye'd _asked_! Tell Ol' Charlie he can suck my-"

There was a blinding flash of light, which was excruciating to me even through the visor of the helmet, and I guess it hurt him as well. When my eyes healed from the lesions the light had caused, I could see Sue, through the librarian, struggling to hold three books under one arm while managing to work an old-fashioned camera with a massive flashgun on top.

"No! Flash! Photography!" I managed to shout through clenched teeth, while dodging a wild left haymaker from the ghost.

"What?" she shouted.

"I'm a vampire, dammit!" I shouted, trying to get a punch in,

"Oh, right. Sorry!"

The Scotsman decided that fists weren't working, so he called his axe back into existence in his hands and stepped back to bring me into swinging range.

I tried to cast a spell that would give me some kind of astral weapon. I miscast three times before getting it right, dodging his axe all the while. A shiny, translucent staff appeared in my hands, and I wacked him in the head with it, several times. It turns out it's not a magically _effective_ weapon, it's just a magically _appearing_ weapon, so I just pissed the highlander off more.

This went on for minutes and minutes, each minute dying like... like a single petal from an autumn rose. No, shit, that sounds dumb. The minutes seemed to be hours, as he kept trying to kill me and I kept casting more and more spells.

Once he got me with his axe, which, of course, passed right through me on the slant. The way ghost weapons work is, little bits of them keep phasing into the mortal plane, and when that happens inside your body, it cuts little channels that should normally be fatal after a while.

I imagine it did do some internal damage, but it should have healed, right? It would take a lot to kill me.

So I got rid of the dumb staff and managed to shoot him a couple of times in the face, but he kept healing.

"Och," he said, as he healed the hole from the last arrow, and began with another wild swing, "this is taking too fookin' long."

"Agreed," I said.

"Um, you know I can make him go away, right?" Sue asked from the other side of the Scotsman.

"Oh," I said.

"Nay!" he said.

"Cover your eyes," she said.

I did. She fired the flash a couple of dozen more times, I guess. I don't know if it just incapacitated him or caused him so much pain or annoyance that he just left, but he was nowhere to be seen when I uncovered the visor of my helmet.

At this point, James Dean or whatever he's called showed up again, with his entire pack. There were so many of them that they blocked the corridor with their stinking, slobbering bulk.

They all shouted things to the effect of " _We heard fighting! We will help! YES!_ "

I had to tell them they were too late.

"Didst thou die? Didst thou win? What happened?"

I gave them a look, a look I'm sure Simon had had to give them many times.

* * *

I tried to sleep on the plane back, about an hour after we'd bid the devil dogs farewell. I couldn't get in a wink.

And then, hours into the flight, I almost managed to. And then I remembered I had a quiz in Inglish Literature in the morning.

No sleep for me, then.

But the quiz went well. You can always think of _something_ valid to say. That's just how Inglish classes work, I guess.


	13. Chapter 12

**April 6, 2987:**

 **Weather: Hace sol**  
 **Mood: even-keeled**  
 **Music: Velvet Underground - Heroin**

 **Dear Diary,**

I founded a new band today.

Well, this phase comes around twice a decade, like clockwork. Usually, I hear a great bassline in some song, and the next day, I find myself playing the same bassline by ear, and wishing I had somebody to jam with.

Sometimes it's the absence of a bassline. I'll jam along and fill in the hole where there should be more bass, and it'll remind of my very first band. We were called The Sombreros. We never wore any sombreros, of course.

It was a simple setup: Chad, he was a cyclops, and he played rhythm guitar. Josephine was a vampire chick, a political dissident who later got shanked by the Empress' forces; she played lead and sang backup. We had about a dozen drummers at different times. I taught myself bass just to have something to do with my hands as I sang.

But for a shining moment in the East Coast underground scene, we were rockstars. We were too punky to be goth and too goth to be true post-punk, but we jammed hard and people liked it. Man, the goths got along with the hardcore punks when we played, and that didn't just happen. Our signature song was called " _The Book of Changes_." I guess I'm telling you things you already know, Diary, but people related to that song, and it took me a century to figure out why.

One day, I was in a back lot (and I never wrote this down,) in a back lot, taking pictures of the wildflowers with a camera and some kind of special lens that my girlfriend at the time had for taking pictures of bugs. I don't remember why anyone was taking pictures of bugs a hundred and twenty years after the war, but whatever. You'd look through the camera and a little flower ten feet away would fill up the whole view-finder, and you'd see all the little specks of dust and bugs crawling on it.

A woman came up to me back there in that lot, crossing engine parts and little clumps of dirt with patchy grass on them. Through the fence and down a steep hill, waves were breaking in what was left of the Chesapeake Bay, and they caught the light in a way I've seen only three times, sea-green and sunset red and orange playing together like in a stained-glass window. When she got to me, I was swearing because I didn't have a regular lens to take a picture of the water.

We save moments when we can, but I wonder if we really ever feel again what we felt the first time-does memory recall with any accuracy what you were feeling when you took a picture, when you look at it ten years later?

So sometimes it's better not to take a picture, I think.

But I was young, and because I'd "lost" that moment, I was swearing like Simon on his worst days. She startled me when she said "Maybe this is a bad time."

Ironically, I was swearing because it was a good time. How I fuck up my best moments.

"No, it's fine," I said, after I got over it. "Do I know you?" I asked. I drank back then, before I got on the harder stuff, enough to live my life in a kind of haze sometimes. I guess I took her for a half-forgotten one-night-stand for a moment. She was a timid little girl of about twenty, in the very last generation of unmutated humans. Her hair was almost white and it covered one of her eyes. They were what people used to call "hazel," which is a mix of all the colors that the sea was at that moment.

"No. I just... I wanted to tell you that that song you sing with the line about 'Running through the high grass as childhood gives in to rust'? That song has my whole life in it."

"Really?" I asked.

But she was running away. I guess it had been hard even to approach me. That shook me, in a way. Some people are that timid with everybody, but I guess it was worse because I was _somebody_. It's not easy to realize you're _somebody_.

The song, of course, was " _The Book of Changes._ " I realized centuries later that it was the song where I stopped trying to be edgy and just started to _be_. It's the only thing from back then that I still sing.

I've actually heard somebody cover it in this century. I was really proud when I heard it.

 _Glob_ , I miss that band, though.. All dead, of course; dead for centuries, and the underground crowd is literally under the ground now, for the most part; food for worms, I mean. I used to say that I avenged Jo when I shanked the Empress, and that one day I'd shank Death himself and avenge Chad and... and all those drummers. Glob knows I loved a few of them too, in one sense or another.

So day before yesterday, I decided to form my first college band. That's how they used to do it, before the war. Most bands formed in college, it seems like. I put out advertisements on a bunch of the school bulletin boards.

Today, Saturday, I got three answers.

First, a familiar little purple lump floated into my dorm room without knocking.

Lumpy Space Princess is a mystery to me. I can't tell whether she's just that self-centered, or what. Still, she's good for a laugh.

She came in and said "Like, I wish I'd know you were here _earlier_ , Marce _line_! I'm just visiting some friends, but, uh, I saw your adver _tise_ ment."

I almost asked her to sit down, but I caught myself. "You interested, LSP?"

"I'm the best. lumping. drummer. that I even _know_. You _need_ me, gurl."

So she talked herself up for a while, and I guess I kinda agreed that she should be in the band. An hour after she'd left to get her drum-kit from Lumpy Space, another surprising person entered.

It was a skeleton. No, it was worse. It was a skeleton with a dog skull or something. It had an evil glare in its bare eyeballs, and it was dressed all in white, which is a nice touch for a skeleton. Black would have been cliché, I must admit.

I'm a little enamoured. Skeleton people aren't my type, but still!

So I asked the person his or her name, and deep, raspy voice half-spoke, half-sung " _I am Death, none can excel, an' I open the door to heaven'r'hell..._ "

"Hey, the Stanley Brothers, cool. No seriously, who are you?"

"No, Marceline, I'm seriously Death. That's my name, my title, and my job."

It was at this point that I tried to shank him and fulfill my oath.

But I couldn't move against him. I picked up my axe, but I couldn't make my arms swing it. I couldn't even make my feet step any closer to him.

"So I guess it's my time to die, huh? I'd wondered," I said, "wondered if you'd just show up one day."

"Wait, what?"

"Aren't you here to kill me?"

"Naw, sis. I'm here to kill a professor, but he won't die."

This took a moment to sink in. "So you're not here to kill me."

"Naw. I'm here to play bass in your band."

"I... um."

"Look, I'm not going to kill you, sis. You're famous for being the best bassist in Ooo, and I want to learn from you. Do you want me in your band, or not?"

"Uh, two basses?"

"It worked for The Malkoviches."

I suddenly noticed that we were both sitting down on the two beds, facing each-other. We hadn't been just a second before. He was showing off his powers, as if to remind me that he might not _really_ be just asking.

" _The Malkoviches,_ " I said, when I'd recovered my cool; "you follow my work."

"In more ways than one. I worked with you closely during the vampire war, if you remember."

I felt rebellious when he said that last part. It's not like he's actually _the concept of death._

 _...right?_

"Look," I said, getting up. "I appreciate that you're a fan and all, but I... I got all the bass I need, right here."

"I'd be a good friend for you, sis," he said, standing up as if to walk to the door. "I'm good luck if you're on my side."

"Is that a threat?" I said.

"Why would I threaten you? I'm already going to kill you one day, when the time is right. What would even be the point?"

I wanted desperately to be able to smoke, so I could light up a cigarette and look like I didn't care that _Death_ was in my room talking about killing me. "You could kill me earlier if I didn't do what you want," I said.

"Um."

"Wait, wait, wait," I said. "You do actually _choose_ when to kill people, right?"

"Um..."

"My Gob, you actually can't kill people whenever you want, can you?"

He hung his head, and muttered as if to himself, "mortals, man. They always think I'm threatening them."

"Whoa, Death," I said. "Is that how you normally make friends?"

"Yeah. Some people take it right, some people don't."

"Like who?" I asked. I probably shouldn't've.

"That peppermint dude."

"He's like, working for my father, isn't he? Of course he likes you."

"Working for your father or vice versa."

I thought about that for a moment. _Holy shit_ , I thought. _Which way would be worse? I don't even know_.

We both looked at each other. I reached a decision, probably an unwise one, but I've been in his place, and I know how it feels. "Hey, look, you want to start this over, dude?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Despite the massive self-pitying buttshit, I like you. Come back tomorrow, bring your bass, and don't try to manipulate me again," I said. He vanished in a puff of smoke.

The third visitor was none other than Sir Susan. I thought she'd come to get her book. See, I'd been surprised for a second when I'd found a green, hardback book titled "Audubon - The Birds of America" in my Knights-issued knapsack, but then I remembered that she'd handed it to me right after the fighting broke out and I'd shoved it in my pack to keep it safe. I had set it one of the little desks in the room.

"So," she said, without bringing up the book. "You like music, right? That's the kind of band you meant on the flier, right?"

"Yeah," I said.

She sat down on Melissa's bed, near where there was still a depression from where Death had sat.

"Well, I'm not like... I'm untrained, but I can kinda play piano. But I understand if that's not good enough!"

"Well, I didn't know shit when I started. Let's see what you can do."

So we walked over to the music building to find a practice room, under cover of a magic cloud she created for me. It cast a beautiful little circle of rain and shade.

The piano we found was in a cramped square room, and it was awkwardly wedged in at an angle just to fit. She sat down at the bench, and I managed to float up and hang down from up near the ceiling, where I could be out of her way but still watch.

I noticed her hands were shaking a little. "I really don't do this."

"I won't judge."

So she started playing this... I don't know how to describe it. It was mostly these huge, strange chords, but they moved up and down the keyboard in an unusual way, making a kind of melody.

In her music, I saw myself leaving the ruined city where I was born, hand in hand with the man who raised me from that day on, looking back and seeing crumbling towers hanging in the mist, with the trees already taking over the streets.

Her sense of rhythm was unsteady and she often lost her place, but _fupp_ , I could listen to that piece all day.

"Did... did you write that?" I asked when she was done.

"Yeah. I was thinking about home the other day and I just kind-of made it up."

"You made me think of home."

"Is that good? I'm sorry if I made you sad! I... I..."

"It's good, Sir Sue. It's good."

* * *

So we all jammed together for the first time that day, on a vacant stage in the theater building, Death, LSP, Sir Sue and I.

The two basses thing is still uneasy, and Sue's sense of rhythm is not actually that great, despite everything else. But we managed to play through " _Cirrus Minor_ " by Pink Floyd twice, and the second time, there was this _moment._

I was singing, of course. It turns out Death doesn't like to sing in front of people. I mean, Grod, it just hit me that I'm in a band with _Death_... the fucking grim reaper. And _I'm_ the frontwoman.

I think I can work with that.

So I was singing and playing. There's a line in that song. I don't even know what it means, but it's a great line.

 _"Saw a crater in the sun... a million miles of moonlight later."_

And it made a chill run down my spine-only the second time, for some reason. And I looked around, at my homegurl the drumming purple lump, at the two beautiful killing machines who were in the band with us, and I loved them. I loved all three of them.

Maybe romantic love, for at least one of them.

But I loved them. And I loved the music I was singing, and the music we were playing, and the bass in my hands felt like a beautiful and good thing, not a weapon forged in the Nightosphere. And I thought for a moment that everything was all right in the world, or at least all the world that I could see at that moment.

And nothing tarnished it. No demon showed up, no one arrived to tell me that someone I loved had died-nothing. But I guess I kinda tarnished it myself, by worrying. Usually when I'm happy like that, something happens, so I worried.

Glob, I worry about these things. Am I going to be forever ruining my own best moments with a casual thought that spirals out of hand, or because I don't have a camera or a book to write it down in? Am I just crazy like that?

But this is going to be a good band, I can tell you that, diary.


	14. Chapter 13

**April 7, 2987,**  
 **Weather: Too damn bright**  
 **Mood: Sucky**  
 **Music: None**

 **Dear Diary,**

It's a funny old world in some ways. I mentioned that I knew another human named Susan to Sir Sue this morning. She looked at me like I had two heads and like, three necks or something. It took me a few seconds to realize that the word _human_ is not in her vocabulary. She doesn't call herself that, and she's only heard the word in passing.

So I told her about other humans and human-ish people I've known, going back to the days when there were rumploads of them running around, starting wars and blowing chunks out of the earth. I told her about my mother, and Simon, Two-bread Tom, Susan Strong, and about Finn.

And I learned about her people, which was frankly the more interesting part of the conversation for both of us. Her people are from the freezing far north, up in what had been Quebec before the waters rose. I learned that in her religion, they believe their messiah will be born in the year 3333, and that he or she will have hair. I learned that they count by nines instead of by tens; not because they have nine fingers (they don't even call the thumb a finger), but because they count on the bones of their fingers by touching them with their thumbs.

And I learned, between the lines of what she said, that she likes me very much, even if her personality won't let her show it that much. I think all of her people are stoic like that.

* * *

So the band was going to practice tonight. We don't have a name or a setlist, but we were going to work on both before dinner. I think Sundays are definitely going to be our practice day in general.

But about lunchtime, as I was gnawing on a chicken bone, trying to find the marrow, a deafening alarm started up. My heart did a triple-beat when I heard it. It's one of those old rotary sirens like the one they were blaring on the last day of the war, when the Great Bloc started shelling North America with H-Bombs. If you don't know what that siren sounds like, you're lucky: it sounds like the biggest engine in the world being revved up to the breaking point and then eased back down, over and over. And that's what the world was like in my childhood.

Now, of course, it's just antique hardware that's been repurposed, like everything else in the world nowadays. It's the signal they give when the Knights must assemble due to immediate danger to the campus. If it's urgent, they spin up the bomb siren, and if it's only a meeting, they ring this cool iron bell.

So I put on a big sun-hat and sunblock and rushed over there. I was too tired to fly, but I gave it a shot and almost got burnt when I came crashing back down in the grass.

I was the last to arrive, of course. All twelve of us besides Sir Howell formed up in the courtyard of the garrison whether we were in armor or not. Howell was wearing special matte-black armor with magical wards drawn on it in white chalk, as if to show beyond doubt who was the boss. His shield was the most beautiful and sweet-looking shade of red I've ever seen, and the books drawn on it glowed with their own light.

He paced the length of the formation once, then turned to address us.

"We have information that a very dangerous enemy is approaching our campus," he said, his voice calm but more than loud enough to carry across the courtyard. "His target is unknown, but the enemies of education seldom need well-defined goals. We will approach him in force and convince him, _aut consiliis aut ense_ , that he needs to leave. We'll let him attack, if he wants to, but what he starts we will finish. Now _scramble_ , I'm not feeling groovy about this!"

I have put on armor fast many times, but I was out of practice and made myself look dumb in the locker room, but less than four minutes later, we were marching out the gate in something like formation, with full armour and flaming swords drawn. The three most senior knights were riding things kinda like horses, only with antlers and tusks, looking incredibly badass.

And who was marching up the main mountain pass to us, with an angry mob at his back, but Billy? I felt _awkward._ Billy's in favor of education, I think, which means there's only one reason he could have come: _to kill me_.

 _"Then I must kill yew;"_ those last words he said to me came back like a sudden echo.

Howell ordered us to halt in front of the gate. In a show of military dressage that was pretty fucking neat, he made his steed turn around on the spot, its legs raised high and its motions dancelike. "Most of them are unarmed civillians," he said. "Put away your swords and take them barehanded, without magic. _Wait for them to attack._ "

We sheathed our swords. I couldn't tell where Sir Sue was among all the Knights in armor, but I seriously doubted she was worried. I sure as hell was, in a way: worried that Billy would accuse me of something awful in front of the others.

As Billy and his mob came closer, the commander gave the order to "break and hold." I probably invented the term centuries ago, but the maneuver is a classic. It means to break formation, spread out in a loose clump and make the unit look as big as possible, but not to attack. It's like a bird puffing out her feathers to seem intimidating.

But there were only ten of us footmen, so we couldn't really make ourselves look all that big. At least it put us in a decent position to block them from advancing through the gate. Sir Howell rode up and _parlayed_ with Billy. That's supposed to be French, and it literally means he "talked" with him. But it also means it's a war crime to kill him while he's talking. Words and their fine shades of meaning...

Sir Howell rode back, with the mob uneasily holding their place behind him as he did.

"These people have a grievance with one of our number," he said. My guts felt like ice. Billy could have told him, like, _everything_. "What do we tell them?" he asked.

" _We are a unit!_ " everyone but me shouted in the direction of the mob. Apparently it's a slogan they didn't bother to teach me. " _We are thirteen and we are one!_ "

I heard some of the Knights near me whispering to each other uneasily, though.

The mob had their answer, and they began to charge. Mobs are fucking bad at charging. There's no system of relaying orders, no front-guard and rear-guard, no buglers and usually no loudspeakers. Nevertheless, they moved towards us, not quite slow and not quite fast, a rolling cloud of people with Billy somewhere near the leading edge. I noticed that a couple of them had lit up torches. Like, totally standard fare.

And they reached us. I started cracking heads left and right. I felt guilty, and I felt like I wasn't helping my case with Billy, but I did it. Most of the mob were various mutant forest animals, but a few of them were non-descript humanoids, and I did my best just to knock them out, but these gauntlets are heavy, so I couldn't always be sure.

Like I thought, they didn't try to make for the gate behind us, and enveloped us instead. I had to concentrate on fighting people on all sides, so it was a while before I could see that the attackers were pulling people's helmets off, looking for me. A couple of them may have bitten the dust permanently while trying to get Julian's helmet off before someone managed it. They didn't try to bother him after that, but he kept harassing them as they kept fighting the ones with helmets on. Mean little fucker can _fight,_ at least.

I managed to break free of a clump of the mob and make for Billy.

"Stop this _now_ , Billy!" I shouted.

"Do you suwwendew?" he boomed.

 _"No!"_

Billy shouted for reinforcements. The helmet-pulling was over now, as they'd identified me. Sir Howell had dismounted and sent his steed away, and he ordered the Knights to form up around me. The other riders dismounted as well.

"We're going to have to talk about this, Knight!" Howell shouted in my direction. "Knights, lethal force against the leader only!"

The others formed the square again with me in the middle rank, and the front edge of the formation all drew their swords. Billy batted the four of them out of the way and went for me directly. He was unarmed, and didn't have his magic gauntlet, but the gauntlets he did have were heavy, and he led with a _massive_ punch to my chest armor. I reeled.

The knights on either side of me noticeably didn't help me, so I was fending off Billy's attacks with my sword and shield and nothing else. If he would've stopped swinging for a second, I could have gotten inside his swinging distance and shanked him real quick, but he knew this and he fought _berserk_. I couldn't gain on him.

His reinforcements arrived, and I found myself fighting two big humanoids as well. I shouted to the two knights next to me, who had moved back a little ways. They made no move except to block passing blows from some of the mob who were harassing them.

"What's _taking_ you?" I shouted, as I knocked a flaming torch out of one of the humanoid's hands.

They made no move. One of the humanoids tried to grab my left arm, earning a gauntlet square in the face, but the other had grabbed my sword-arm. Billy backed off, and the one I'd just punched pulled a little dagger and went for the kill.

And Sir Susan was suddenly there. She caught his arm and broke it, before punching out the other humanoid.

Billy backed off further and ordered his entire mob to kill me. I have to say, that's _so_ not his style, but people change.

The animals and humanoids left what they were doing and surrounded the two of us. There were three or four torches in the loose circle that came together around us. There were a couple of swords, too. One of those creepy deer with the fingers was swinging a big morningstar flail around, and he advanced ahead of the rest, towards Susan and I. No other knights were in the circle.

Suddenly, I heard a deep, ancient-sounding voice saying some kinda magical words. Everything else went supernaturally quiet while this voice finished its spell.

Then _something_ ran through the circle and back out, faster than the eye could see. A humanoid and a bipedal pig found themselves disarmed and knocked on their butts before anyone knew what was happening. Another pass knocked the deer clean over, and the flail was nowhere to be seen. Then the flail landed on another attacker's head. Suddenly, a blur ran into the middle of the circle and stopped in front of the two of us.

It was Sir Howell. His hands were empty, but his skin glowed with magic power, and so did the magic signs on his armor.

"Go!" he shouted.

They obeyed. Grod, the attackers obeyed.

Billy went too, but he kept looking back at me.

* * *

We all limped inside, back to the garrison, where we all took off our armor and the wounded were treated by med students. Not many were wounded, of course, but one Knight, one of those translucent people from the West, had been stabbed in the throat with a wooden stake when his chainmail came undone. He was barely breathing and running the highest fever the students had ever seen. A real doctor was called in, and he was rushed away.

After I'd gotten cleaned up and showered. Sir Howell called me to his office, where he'd already lit incense and put a tea kettle on the hot-plate. He asked me to sit down.

"So what's the story with this guy?" he asked.

"Deluded hero. He thinks he has to kill the last vampire in Ooo."

"He has reasons, of course?" he asked.

"Of course. I haven't been a saint."

He looked at me hard for several seconds. "Do you pose a danger to this campus? Think very hard before you answer."

"I... _of course!_ Billy's going to come back."

"He poses a danger. Do you?"

"What, am I going to snap and start killing people?"

He didn't answer.

"Of course I'm not going to murder anyone! I've done things I'm not proud of, but I'm not a psychopath."

"Then Billy will have to kill me before he kills you. Do you understand?"

I didn't. I mean, I _have_ killed people for money multiple times in the last forty years, and sometimes I do get certain... _urges._ If he just wants to die protecting some poor sap, he can do better than me. A lot better. I don't get altruists, I guess.

But I said "Yes, sir."

"That will be all, Provisional Knight Abadeer."

"Yes, sir," I said. I stood up, but hesitated at the door.

"Is there something else?"

Whoo, boy, here it comes.

"There were these two knights," I said. "They just stood there while Billy and his idiots attacked me!"

" _What?_ "

"I swear!"

"Sit back down," he said. I did.

"Could you identify them?"

"No, sir, they wore human-shaped armor, they were both about average-sized..."

"Was it reasonable to expect that they'd come over and help you?"

"They weren't doing shit. _-I'm sorry, sir,_ I mean they weren't doing anything. No one was really attacking them."

"That's not good. I'll check into it personally. Oh, and by the way," he said. "Your investiture is tomorrow afternoon. Make sure your armor is presentable. I'm just about to do the same."

Outside, I found out that that guy, Sir Moon-In-Trees, had died of infection and damage to his windpipe. I felt faint.

* * *

I called everyone and canceled rehearsals, and spent a while sitting in the dorm bathroom, staring at a tube of blue paint. I threw it in the trash unopened, but it still calls me to it, even now.

There's a wake for the Knights tonight, because they're sending the dead man home to be buried. I'm not going. To be honest with you, diary, I'm thinking about leaving. I've gotten somebody killed, I've brought ruffians here, and just generally _fucked_ things. I don't know what the good of staying here would be.


	15. Chapter 14

**April 9,**  
 **Weather: decent**  
 **Mood: decent**  
 **Music: Yo La Tengo - Moby Octopad**

 **Dear Diary,**

I talked to Foxham and felt better.

I went to his office towards the end of his open office hours on Monday. In front of him, on his low, ugly desk, was a grease-stained white bath towel. He had dissasembled his typewriter on it, laying out the parts in a precise way, and now he was cleaning and oiling each one, turning it over in his oddly-shaped paws.

I asked for his advice. "I hope it isn't an imposition," I said.

"Ms. Abadeer, I _am_ your advisor. It's part of my job to give you advice, and besides, um, I really don't mind."

So I told him what had happened. I told him how guilty I feel about Moon-in-trees dying, and about Billy, and about _everything._

"Um, I'm going to tell you something," he said, as he took one of the hundred little metal fingers with stamps on the ends and rubbed a cloth over it, "and I hope you don't think I'm trying to minimize your situation. One time, long ago-I was just a child in fact; this was forty-two years ago-my family were walking through the forest, quiet as foxes are wont to be, and my father told us to stand still and be completely silent.

"Like a stubborn ass, I asked him why, and when he wouldn't tell me, I asked again, and again, four times. The wolves he'd been hearing showed up then and they... they massacred my parents and all but one of my sisters: my fault, from anyone's angle."

" _I'm so sorry!_ " I said.

"That's all right. I've had a long time to grieve. But it was only about six years ago that I realized how long ago it'd been, and how young I'd been when it happened. I realized that I wasn't the same child who had gotten my family killed, not anymore."

I had to argue, of course. "I was born in Atlanta one thousand years ago and lost my innocence pretty soon after that," I said. "I wasn't a child when I got that man killed yesterday."

"I know how old you are, Ms. Abadeer. You were Hunson's _first_ child with a human, weren't you?"

I didn't know how to take that question. What _is it_ with my dad and these people? "...yeah. The only one that survived," I said.

"I thought so. Um..." and he leaned in across his desk to whisper, "ask me about him later, when we're not in my office. Thin walls, you know?"

"...okay?"

"Well, Ms. Abadeer," he said, "I shouldn't beat myself up too badly about what happened yesterday, if I were you. You're already a different person. Or did his death not teach you anything?"

"It taught me something," I said, "I don't know what."

"Then remember, _he not busy being born is busy dying_ ," he said. "Never stop learning hard lessons."

He looked with a tired expression at the typewriter parts meticulously arranged on the towel in front of him, little pieces closer to him and big pieces in another row. He grabbed the frame and started to fit other parts on to it with slow, precise motions.

"Um," he said. "You're earning your spurs tonight, is that right?"

"I dunno if it's _right._ It's true."

"Now, now, you've earned it. It's an important ceremony. I could arrange for your father to be there to see you, you know."

"I could too. I don't want him there, thanks."

"It was just a thought. How about me and Donovan?"

"...I'd like that," I said.

* * *

So I went to the garrison and cleaned my armor to within inches of its life. I traded in the leather inner boots for a pair with stiffer, newer leather around the heel. Spurs are miserable to wear if the shanks press through onto the sides of your foot.

I found out only five minutes before the investiture that Sue had reccomended that I be comissioned as a full Knight First Class, skipping Second Class entirely. Sue's so great.

The ceremony was on the indoor fencing pitch. There's not much to tell, really: you flip up one heel, Howell puts the spur on it, you flip up the other heel and he puts the spur on that one. Then Sir Howell gave a short speech, read my comission orders, and told me to kneel and asked me what I'd like to be "dubbed."

I thought for a moment, though very self-consciously, because literally everyone I know at the university was there, including two of my professors, and Death, surprisingly enough.

"'Sir Marceline,'" I said. I almost said "Sir Vetiver," but I'd never get used to it.

He tapped me on each shoulder with his sword, which thankfully wasn't on fire, saying "I dub you 'Sir Marceline, Knight First Class of the Fighting Order of the Heroic Lyceum.' Bear this title in honor and loyalty and you will receive in equal measure, great honor and loyalty."

" _Hear, hear!_ " the other knights all shouted, some more enthusiastically than others. I didn't look for Sir Julian, but I'm sure he wasn't happy that I outranked him now.

"Rise," Sir Howell said. I did.

* * *

Afterwards, I changed out of my armor. Foxham found me as I left the garrison.

"Um, I was wondering if you'd like answers about a few things."

I didn't want to sound impolite, but boy did I want answers. I told him that.

"Well, look," he said, once we'd walked away into the quadrangle, "your father came here long ago trying to make a deal with the chancellor. I'm, um, really, really, really not supposed to know or tell you this, but rank has its privileges."

We passed under the thick canopy of the ancient sandalwood tree. "Charlie has been the chancellor since the fff-" he caught himself before saying something he knew he shouldn't. "...a long time, at any rate. He was dabbling in deeper forms of magic even than Sir Howell. Your father must have wanted his soul pretty badly because of it. So he came here long before my time, posing as a student named Martius Ossian, and the story goes that he offered the chancellor a deal: immortality, in exchange for soullessness."

"No deal," I said.

"No, I don't think so either. I understand that a being without a soul would lack any will to live. Is that correct?"

"For most people that's true. It's not fun, at any rate."

He looked at me funny for a moment. "Then, of course, came the famous Solstice Massacre. Your father left thirteen students soulless and two more dead when he left in the middle of his second semester. I don't know why."

 _Daaaad_ , I thought. "Does anyone know what happened between him and Charlie?"

"Probably. I don't."

But still, he's not telling me everything, I'm sure. He sometimes starts to talk like he knew my father, and he _knows_ how to summon my father, but then he says that Dad only came here centuries ago, before his time. Still, I want to believe he's protecting me, because I can tell he feels responsible for me. I just wish he wouldn't.

* * *

I called up Dad later. He told me precisely _jackshit_ about his rampage here, but I'm going to get to the bottom of it. Sir Howell thinks it was two centuries ago. He was surprisingly frank about the fact that he'd had an opium habit sometime since then, so I guess his memory is patchy. I told him I'd had a different habit once too, and he just chuckled and said "you live long enough, you'll eventually try it all, I guess." We shared a number of meaningful looks in the swirling patchouli silence of that office after that. I left feeling aged but not matured.

Band rehearsal went well that night. We managed to get through four songs, and I turned Sue on to Yo La Tengo. She seemed to connect with their music on a musical level almost instantly. I've only met five other people who really liked that band, and two of them were in The Sombreros with me, so I'm _really_ glad to have met another.

Death is still adorable, LSP is still LSP, and I'm... not busy dying, I guess.

I've got to go, because it's getting light out and I have Doich 101 and History 101 this morning (and I still haven't got the hang of Tuesdays), but before I forget, we named the band "The Thieves." Death doesn't like it, but sucks to that.


	16. Chapter 15

**April 9 again,**  
 **Weather: getting hotter**  
 **Mood: still decent**  
 **Music: The Ramones - Sheena is a Punk Rocker**

 **Dear Diary:**

Why is it that whenever my life gets back into gear and starts getting normal, weird shit starts happening?

So it was after Doich class. That little green jelly mutant, Dr. Mungey, teaches it. He's funny, I can stand his perky attitude in small doses, and I needed a foreign language requirement, so it's not terrible. I learned that Doich is the same thing as German, by the way. It's also spelled "Deutsch," so I guess I'll totally forget that now and keep spelling it "Doich."

Anyways, today, to demonstrate a point, Dr. Mungey stood up _on his desk_ and started singing opera. That should tell you what he's like. He's also brought doughnuts to class, lit smoke bombs and made one of us try to do his job while he pretended to be a student, just in the three class periods we've had so far. But I think he does it on purpose to get our guards down. I dunno.

So Mungey lets us out before the end of the period sometime. I would've had a two hour, ten minute break before history, but today it was going to be more like two-twenty. I went to kill some time and ended up sitting in a hallway in the Arts and Letters Building, doodling in my composition book. (Don't get jealous, Diary, I still love you the most.) And who should come pouring in through an emergency exit, but the coyotes from the Wastelands? All of them, smelling like butt and ass, in fact.

But seriously, I'm stuck with them. They made the journey from the Central Great Wastes _on foot_ , found a den in the area, and they've sworn to protect me with their lives. Fuck.

* * *

Because I had to spend so much time talking to J.D. and his crew, my break went by like _that_. I went up to the third floor for history class. The room is in an odd corner of the building and I still sometimes take a few minutes to find the right hallway.

Why am I taking history, you ask? Two things: A: it's required and B: it's _funny_. It's funny watching this guy Dr. Toadman editorialize about things that happened way before he was born. _I_ was there when the main tribe of humans fled the continent, and it wasn't for religious reasons. I was there when Peebs annihilated the Bathboys and it wasn't because she "hates men." So watching him make up this story about what happened, based on basically _jackshit_ , is hilarious!

I asked Toadman about the "General Abadeer" who fought the Bathboys in the Mountain Siege of 2525, by the way. He said something like "According to some accounts, she was one of Bubblegum's wives or concubines, _uh-huh-huh_." He looked at me funny when I laughed my head off.

So I am _required_ to watch two hours of standup every week, basically. I'm exaggerating, but still!

Anyways, it's funny that Toadman said "wives." It really is. As far as I know, Prub-Bubs's only been married those two times, and those were centuries apart. But it got me thinking about her. So I called her up after class, seeing as my new "subjects" were thankfully nowhere to be seen.

It was not a productive phone call. The tension wasn't there this time-maybe _she's_ the lonely one today-but all she wanted to talk about was _study this, study that_ , and for a second I felt like I was talking to a parent, not an old girlfriend.

So I made an awkward excuse and let her go. But romance was on my mind after that.

* * *

A writer that Simon was obsessed with, who had a funny name*, once said that "peculiar traveling suggestions are dancing lessons from God." Now, God, like Glob and the rest, is still out of my comfort zone, but I believe in fate, which may well be the whim of some higher being.

Coming here was a weird idea, and I guess Leaf suggested it to me in a way, so I guess the dancing lessons have begun. I just didn't think there'd be any actual dancing.

I mean, I can dance, but I prefer to just float around and play bass and biz like that. So when I heard there was a mandatory "Knight's Ball" on the twelfth, I've got to say I was a little nervous. The last time I did any ballroom dancing was...

Glob, has it been that long ago?

No, no it hasn't. The _very_ last time was at a wedding and we'll leave it at that. But the point is, I can do it. I know how. You hold the other person _like so_ , you step in a little triangle in time with the beat, _one-two-three_ , you do it backwards, _one-two-three_ , then you turn, _one, two and three._ Rinse, lather, repeat. There's other ones and they're all the same ideas in different time signatures. I could probably work it out in my head for seven-quarters time, eleven-eighths...

But with who?

(My mental projection of my Mom just appeared to scold me for that.)

 _Sorry, Mom._ With _whom_?

I have to invite a partner, which is fine by me, because I want to make some romance happen, but I'm a little... okay, way the fuck indecisive about it.

Melissa Bankley, I'll ask to the dance as a joke, to see her reaction. Hell, throw in Sir Julian. He'll say "fuck no" and I'll say "but you'd look good in a dress." If he swings at me, I'll duck, then I'll have him put on report for attempted assault of a ranking officer. If he doesn't, I still get to piss him off that way.

But as for seriously asking someone to the dance, _whom_?

Death? Sue? That weird cat-faced woman from Inglish 101?

Well... I've got to go get cleaned up and ask somebody out.

* * *

* I think his name was Tirk Vogganut. Simon, or that other person in Simon's body, still reads his books to this day. I've read most of them too.


	17. Chapter 16

**April 10, 2987,**  
 **Weather: TOO BRIGHT DAMMIT**  
 **Mood: thoughtful**  
 **Music: The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Fights the Pink Robots Pts. 1 & 2**

 **Dear Diary,**

So I had to go to Mungey's office hours. It was just a grammar thing I didn't understand; no big deal. But then we had the most fascinating conversation.

He can kinda speak the Old Tongue of the Vampires, the language Josephine taught me by telepathy one night when we were lovers-one of only two nights when we were. I was a little startled to hear it spoken. I thought I destroyed the second-to-last speaker a long time ago... I mean, technically that person killed _me_ at the same time, so really there weren't supposed to be any _living_ speakers at all.

But he says it's called "Romanian," a Europan language from before the War. Europa, by the way, is a continent in another world. It was apparently very important back then. The way they talk about it, I can't tell whether it's on another planet or in another group of continents somewhere _beyond_ the Encircling Sea. I thought there were basically two continents back then, surrounded by the Sea and joined by a bridge called "Central" that got bombed out of existence at about the same time as the waters rose. Apparently that was just part of a much bigger planet.

(Sometimes they say Europa was in "the Old World," which is what most people call the world before the War, so that's confusing as fupp.)

But the great thing about this place, college I mean, is that I learn something every day. What did the guy say in that old sci-fi movie? "The sleeper must awaken." I feel like I'm constantly being woken up.

I just wish I'd get more mature in the process. _Keep striving_ , Dad once said. At this rate I'll be striving forever, getting better but not getting to my destination...

So anyways, we talked for an hour. Mungey's crazy as butts, but I like him.

* * *

So I jokingly asked Melissa to the ball...

Hoo boy...

 _Never do that._

I'd even _known_ that that was a rule. _I_ get mad when people yank _me_ around like that. _Fuck._

So, um, Marcie: Like, don't play with girls' feelings, girl.

Well, she took it as pathetic instead of humorous. She has the "popular girl" thing, alright. I guess I've had it too. She instantly agreed to go with me _out of pity_ , while mentioning all the time how she has a boyfriend, and then she wouldn't let me talk my way out of it. Everything I said was just further proof to her of how _desperate_ I was, how much I _needed_ to be seen with her to salvage my social life.

I could have disillusioned her bad. I could have told her she's not _all that_ and that I really don't need her, but I have to live with her in this cramped room for the rest of the semester, except for nights spent at the garrison. So I'm goddamn stuck taking out this girl to a ball that only happens once a semester, one I wanted to take someone else to.

* * *

"It's important to balance your caloric intake with your level of activity. Look what your species normally eats, and look at the normal diet for your species. If you're a... a hamster... I think we've got some hamsters here...

"One thing you should do is you should wear condoms. Another thing you should do is you should look the normal diet of hamsters and the normal level of activity that hamsters do every day. If you're twice as active -bloody unlikely- then you might get away with eating a little more than other hamsters. If you're half as active as a normal one, you should eat somewhat less."

Later, "And again, balancing the seven basic food groups is important. Like wearing condoms is important."

Not only is that awkward as _hell_ , just think about it for a second: never once was it "make your boyfriend wear condoms." That just kills me. It's the thirtieth century! Wasn't this how the last World War started?

Thank glob I'm a genetic mule with no possibility of children... right?

* * *

Well, I rented a carpet after health class. A _flying_ carpet. I drove it all the way back home to the cave for supplies, under cover of darkness. I flew it up to the edge of space so I could make it in an hour and a half, which made me sad, thinking about how I used to be able to fly this high without a vehicle. Up here there's not a lot of air, which is fine by me, and the stars are bright, in a way that oddly doesn't hurt or burn my skin. The world below looks beautiful with that perpetual storm system over Northwest Ooo and the lines of ice clouds like leylines across the face of the planet. I can just see the edge of the giant chunk.

I feel pretty alright up here; in altitude, I'm as high as anyone's been since the old days, but I don't know if I'm exactly high in the emotional sense. I'm pretty good, I guess.

But Sir Sue flies a rickety little military courier plane from a thousand years ago that can hardly get up two-and-a-half miles in the air, and she describes it like it's _nirvana._

I must be a rather sad person in the grand scheme.

* * *

It's wonderful to be back at the cave, even just for an hour. In my closet here, I have this wonderful suit, a real tuxedo but with a feminine flair and perfectly tailored for me. I also have a flowing jet black dress with real carved obsidian up the bodice. Either would be perfect for that dance.

Glob, more hard choices! I need to just go find a coin...

* * *

Author's note:

Well, folks, Marie here: I'm at a point of decision. I have two versions of the following story-line planned out in my head, and I don't want to choose until I get some feedback from **you**.

The first one, the one that I'd rather do, is dark as hell. I'm in a dark and slightly gothy mood this month, and I revised my outline heavily last night to arrive at this new plotline. It's a little inspired by the _Amber_ series I've been reading, and also by some old horror films. Basically, if I write this story-line, things are going to get a lot worse for Marcy before they get any better. There will be more deaths, a bit of rather visceral horror that might be a bit much for some people, and I'm going to make good on a recent piece of innocent foreshadowing that I wasn't really going to run with before. There would still be just as much humor and awkward college romance and just as many light moments, but Marcy will go some _dark_ places, and not all of them will be in her head like before.

The second plotline is the original, which I had planned before last night: the broad strokes are the same, but the violence is going to be less personal to Marceline, the horror will be toned down, and there will probably be fewer deaths. I don't think it'll be as satisfying, because if you don't fall as far you don't have as far to climb, but I'm willing to do it if that's what most people want.

I don't want to alienate my regular audience if they're not down for horror and a little darkness. I want to hear from you, either in review form or by PM. What are you down for? I'm not going to decide right away, no matter what, and if things get really dark and people start disliking it, I'll start steering back in the lighter, fluffier direction. I'd just like to hear from you now so I can possibly start doing a little foreshadowing in the next few chapters here.

Thanks for reading, and tons of love,  
 _Marie Stanton_


	18. Chapter 17

Sorry for the dubiously relevant flashback and comedy scene! I'm looking for feedback from my regular readers about whether I should amp the horror in this fic way up or leave it about where it is. This will influence a major plotline, because I have an idea that involved some body-horror and I kinda wrote the outlines around it. 

Doing a dumb update like this where nothing really happens in the present is a good way to put off making a decision. Sorry!

* * *

 **April 11, 2987:**

 **Weather: Gloom, beautiful gloom**  
 **Mood: Aight**  
 **Music: Pink Floyd - Cymbaline**

 **Dear Diary:**

Sometimes, I think that if you were a real person, you'd resent how often I retell stories you've already heard. This has sure been a year of flashbacks, right? Maybe I never told you that story about the village where I went on a feeding frenzy, but I surely told you all those stories about Mom and Dad and Simon before, back when I remembered them right, and I _know_ I wrote pages and pages about that day in the back lot with the girl who liked my songs, right when it happened, but I told you again a couple of pages ago, just _because_.

But I guess it's useful to retell them now. I dunno whether I'm looking at my life now through the lens of the past, or the past through the lens of my life now, (and like, that sentence made no sense,) but I guess we find our meaning in life where we can.

Like, what I'm trying to say is, bear with me for this one, diary.

* * *

Half my life ago: it was the 2510's, and I was sitting in a jail cell. I'd beat somebody up, stolen something and gone on the lam, but they caught me before I could get to my vehicle. I didn't plan this one with the rigour that I would have planned a war, really.

I can still remember that day exactly in perfect color, unlike a lot of things from back then. It's like if you're not careful when you're shooting pictures on film and most of them turn out too dark or too bright, but one is in perfect, lifelike color. Clumsy metaphors aside, I was sitting with the shadows of prison bars across my face, stinging a little from the filtered sunlight from the tinted windows high above. I can somehow remember that I was barefoot, wearing jeans that were hardly ragged at all and a really expensive men's flannel shirt in autumn colors. I could probably describe that plaid well enough for someone to make it, if those kinds of machines weren't so damn hard to find. It had brown felt elbow pads too.

The bass guitar I'd stolen had gotten smashed in the fight when the police aprehended me, and they'd taken my pocket change and my satellite phone. They didn't even give me a phone call. Yeah, things weren't looking good. This was, like, in a bad place, out west, and I could have gone to prison for a long time. Well, a long time for you, which is a medium time for me. I was waiting for a very precise moment to escape. My plan was to like, turn into a bat as they took me to the courthouse or something. This bat, you cannot cage...

Well, suddenly, I hear this girl's voice in the next cell. She's whining in a language I didn't speak at the time. I actually know a few words now.

I guess what she said was " _Mein Gott, Mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?_ " And she said it in a voice like she really meant it, too.

So when the warden left to get coffee, I shouted over to her.

"Hey, who are you?"

"I'm Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum of the Candy Kingdom. I'm a political prisoner, _illegally,_ I might add."

"The Princess Bubblegum?" I asked. I'd ruled a kingdom briefly too by then, and I was way impressed with the fact that she was taking on the Seven Gangs. Those boys were _crazy_. Somebody needed to throw their asses in cells, not mine.

"The one and only," she said in a voice that was supposed to sound cute or something. "Who are you?"

"Marceline the Vampire Queen."

It was her turn to be impressed.

So I turned into a bat and snuck into her cell.

This was before even my first bout with insomnia. When I look back now, it's with a... whatcha call it, a jaundiced eye. I feel like I was always bursting with energy back then, and like I never did that much with it.

Then again, I have a discography that's measured in hundreds of albums and I've ruled multiple countries- this one time, for a couple of days, I was the superpower in Ooo - and fought many wars besides. I really wasn't idle.

But I can't help but look back with envy and resentment now: until I get this insomnia licked, I can barely turn into a bat on a good day. Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? ...mmm, bop bop.

I changed back into myself, clothes and all, inside the cell.

She looked me over and I looked her over.

I like to _think_ she fell hopelessly in love with me in that moment, but to be honest that's some wishful-thinking buttshit. It took her a while to even accept help from me, while we were stuck in that cell.

So we busted out, and made our way to where my hearse was hidden, under a camoflauge tarp in the forest behind a Squeezee Mart. See, since getting kicked out of the Second Iowan Imperium that I'd built on the ashes of the first one, I'd been making a few cents here and there as a gonzo journalist.

(I know you know, diary, but I don't often revisit these things, and writing about them keeps them fresh in my memory. I'm always scared of losing my memory like the guy in that book.)

For about two years, I drove around in a hearse called "Horse," with a beautiful pre-war AE-1 film camera on a strap around my neck and an electric typewriter that ran off the cigarette lighter, interviewing political dissidents and rock bands and shit like that, for the "Zombie-Ass" alt-news zine.

Did I mention that Horse could fly? Back when I had magical energy to spare, dude... When I was dating that prick, we totally should have been "Ash the Whatever Queen and Marceline the Enchanter," not "Ash the Enchanter and..." for all he ever enchanted anything. So yeah: Horse was a flying hearse with a padded coffin in the back and vinyl bucket seats from a pre-war El Camino in the front, not to mention a working eight-track player that I'd stolen from a dictator's Cadillac.

* * *

So the princess and I were heading back from the coastal wastelands that were once West Texas, at a cruising altitude of I don't care. Clouds were going by under us, and the mutant algae sea was glowing in the broad daylight out the right window, while the cratered desert was blinding to the left. The princess looked frankly adorable sitting on her hands in the passenger's seat with my typewriter in her lap-I guess there was nowhere else to for her to put it.

She was telling me about how much work it was governing her little empire of morons. She'd been stuck in the cell for a week, and had been away for two days before that, so she fully believed she'd come back to a smoking pile of rubble where her castle had been.

"Like, the guy I left running it, Mr. Creampuff-"

"Whoa, is he like, your boyfriend?"

"He's like my boyfriend."

I noted her lack of a comma. "Anyways, keep telling."

"-he might have been fine for 48 hours, but _nine days?_ He's a little... slow. I'm thinking of creating these little gumball robots to handle this..."

This was when the two police choppers caught up to us. I rolled down the window (Horse didn't have power windows, so this took a tense ten seconds,) leaned out and flipped off the police. I was surprised to see the uptight little princess start rolling down her window a second after I did. She flashed them the deuce when she got the window open.

That's when the bullets started flying. They started strafing us! A few rounds hit my poor Horse. My only consolation was that bullets were worth about twice their weight in gold in that economy. _Yeah, shoot me, suckers_ , I might have thought. _You're accounting to your bosses for every shot! How do I know? I was the defense contractor who outfitted you twenty years ago, and those look like the same choppers I sold you for thirty million a pop._

So I told the princess that we'd use plan 11B. I had no plan, much less any numbered contingencies for these situations, but there was only one real option. I'm not a fighter pilot; I can't fight in the air. We suddenly dropped a few thousand feet and made a rolling landing on the beach. I had to do all this mentally, by the way, because the steering wheel was just for show when Horse was in the air.

We bounced around, rocked and rolled down the dirty beach and finally came to a halt, making a dust cloud all around us. We were parked on a wide strand with the sea a hundred feet to our right. I stuck my head out the window. The wheels were fouled. They'd buried themselves up to the center of the hubcap.

The choppers landed about a hundred feet away and a full SWAT team of those little red scaly mutants poured out of them.

I froze up. I hadn't been expecting that.

But the princess opened her door and got out. She strode like Patton towards the small army advancing towards us. I got out to watch, but stayed low.

When she was dead between the hearse and the men, she shouted " _You have forced me to use my final sanction!_ " She dialed something on a remote that was apparently set into her wrist.

I'm not going to lie to you, a laser beam a foot wide shot down out of space and swept back and forth while she worked the remote. It killed them all. Glob, they screamed as they burned. The pilots ran out instead of taking off like they should have, and she killed them too.

" _Gotterverdammt, verdammt, verdammt!_ " she said when she got back to the hearse. I didn't really need that translated.

"What?" I said, in a frightened whisper.

"That satellite only works once, and I didn't build it. _Damn the Soviets! No foresight at all!_ "

* * *

Horse was stuck in the sand. It took me several days and a lot of energy to alter the spells on it so that it'd lift straight up instead of taking off like a plane. I let the Princess sleep in the coffin and I kept watch by a little fire at night. She'd been quiet since her tantrum after killing the men.

One night, she came out to me.

"You know, you're alright, your majesty," she said to me. "I'd heard you were a real psychopath."

"You _really_ don't have to call me 'your majesty,' your majesty. You've never even called me by my name," I said. I wasn't sure who'd called me a psycho, but I kinda wanted to find them and drink their blood, so I probably wasn't doing much to help my case.

"You want a job or something?" she asked me.

I almost said "or something." What I said was "yeah, that'd be nice."

I didn't have a lot of energy left after all the magic work, so we put Horse on the helicopter that the laser hadn't grazed, and we flew it back to her kingdom. I should say _I_ flew it, because she mostly just listened for radio transmissions. I let her take the controls a couple of times, but I noticed that the chopper would start vibrating funny whenever she flew it.

SECTION BREAK

Six months later we were married. It's like, really weird: I can't remember who courted who. (Who courted whom. Sorry, mom.) I guess we both kinda jumped into it after a while. I mean, we were both attracted, and a brainlord like Bonnie needs someone she can actually talk to.

Lying in bed one night, in the half-finished candy castle, I asked her who'd called me a psycho.

 _Hoo, boy_. She'd followed my work, as it turns out. Nobody told her I was a psycho, she decided that for herself.

I asked her if she still thought that.

"You know, I'm really not convinced one way or the other. Your psychology is fascinating..."

"Whatever, I didn't really want to know."

She didn't like that I interrupted her, or that I didn't care what she had to say. Ten seconds later, we were insulting each other and raising our voices. It went on all night, and a lot of heavy artillery got called in. I brought up her mommy issues, which is, like, a big deal for her. She doesn't think she can have mommy issues since she came from the Mother Gum. I think she'd almost have to.

She brought up my father, my mother, cussed out Simon, and said some unkind things about my favorite species as well.

Six months later, we were divorced and I was just a low-ranking general in her army. The second time we tried, a century later, we didn't get married, the third time... well, you know how that went down.

I say all this to say: that's how romance always goes for me, I'm realizing. Six months in, we have our first fight and six months later it's all over. It's not Peebs, it's probably me at this point, because it happened with Ash, it happened with Max... it pretty much always happens

So why do I still want romance so bad? I do, I _really_ do. I just don't know why. I'm ready for another relationship, but I want this one to be different.

So what I'm really saying is, I need to find a way to get out of going to the ball with Melissa.

* * *

Classes were alright. Dr. Mungey was teaching today, rather loudly, I'll admit, when Dr. Foxham strode into the classroom with his stepstool under his arm. He opened it and stood on it in front of Mungey's desk, which brought him eye level to Mungey.

"Für die Liebe Globbes in fickendem Himmel," Foxham said, "LEHREN SIE RUHIGER!"

(It's funny, becaue I keep forgetting Foxham speaks German.)

"Your pronounciation," Mungey said, grinning smugly, ear-to-ear, "could stand to be better. ' _Ruhiger;_ ' pronounced 'ROOO-ih-gur,' say it with me."

"I mean, it's all week," Foxham said. "I'm trying to teach a legitimate Inglish class next door, while from the sound that's coming through my wall, you seem to have made lazily lecturing on a dead language into a full contact sport! Could you tone it down just a little on occasion, Phil? _Ich meine, mein Grott!_ "

I'm such a terrible person. I love to see my favorite people fight. I feel like I know them better afterwards.

The end result was that Dr. Sarastino came in with a rolled up newspaper. She towered over them threatening to smack them, until they reached a diplomatic solution.

So Foxham taught German for the rest of the period, and Mungey must have taught Inglish next door. Foxham should totally be one of the German teachers, but I guess he does everything else in the universe, so one more thing would be an imposition.

I can only imagine how Mungey taught Inglish...


	19. Chapter 18

**April 13th, 2987,**

 **Weather: Passable**  
 **Mood: Relieved**  
 **Music: Prokofiev - Dance of the Knights is still ringing in my ears although Stevie Nicks - Planets of the Universe is playing on my MePod**

 _ **Hello Journal,**_  
 _ **It's me,**_  
 _ **It's been a while since we talked**_  
 _ **About life and stuff...**_

Time doesn't actually care about these arbitrary circles that we make it wrap around, does it?

Like, a day is just a day, right? It doesn't matter if it's the same day of the year, it's not actually the _same_ day, right? Because otherwise, I'd have just about worn some of these days out from living them so many times.

There's an old religious holiday that passed the other weekend. Due to a certain woman's obsession with the old human religions, I was married on that day once, centuries ago.

I still remember that day: the long, drawn-out words of the little candy preacher that she'd made for the church: " _Hell seized a corpse and met God. Hell seized Earth and encountered Heaven..._ " and on like that, quoting Bonnie's favorite theologian. When the Easter service was over and the wedding service had begun, I remember her walking down the aisle in a minimalist white dress, on the arm of some friend of hers from another kingdom, tears on her cheek.

I remember waiting nervously in the wings of the chapel in a black skirt-suit with black hose; looking up at the arched, poured-concrete roof and wondering, with that greasy feeling in my stomach, whether I was about to royally fuck up.

I royally fucked up, of course, marrying Bonnie. Every time I've ever worn black hose it's turned out for the worse, in fact. They're like, not my good luck charm.

Easter was also the day I got back together with Bonnie centuries later, and I think we broke up again almost exactly a year later, so I would have been pretty low and possibly strung out on Easter of that year.

Hell, there's more. I think I got low on Easter a few years ago after I broke up with Ash the Enchanter on the day they call Ash Wednesday. I think I may have done some blue that Easter.

My memory is as fucked as Sir Howell's.

So yeah, if it really were the same day every year, it'd be worn out by now, like old jeans. But it's not, because nothing happened this year. I had a good Easter. I had lunch with the band, and then I went up to Foxham's office to ask him something. He let me borrow another book, and we talked an hour about time and memory and a dozen other things... hence the rant I just went on, of course. It was oddly comforting, just talking about life and things.

I'd marry him, I really would, but he's married to a typewriter and a manuscript and having a passionless affair with an older fox named Vixy, and I have my eye on someone else.

And you know, there's the fact that he's a smallish woodland animal. Glob, when I think of him, I think of his _mind_.

* * *

But I'm stalling. I had a hella bad time at the party, but it was alright, because I had an okay time afterwards.

* * *

I arrived, or as Cardi would say, I _arrove_ at the party on my rented carpet, which labored like a pack animal under Melissa's weight and mine.

The sun was down, and the Chinese lamps were up. We were fashionably late, which is, like, five minutes before unfashionably late. _Fucking late_ is five minutes after that. Funny thing, for a lazy problem student, I've never actually been _fucking_ late to class.

They'd set up a wide square and laid down wooden panels to make a kind of dance floor. Most of the Knights were already there, in rented tuxedos, wedding dresses dyed pink or tie-dyed (this was the year _after_ tie-dye had been back in fashion, for future reference), and a few were in very nice clothing. Maybe two dozen rando students were there too; most of them better were dressed than most of us.

I'd settled on the tuxedo, myself. It's way fucking cool, my tuxedo: it has skinny, pointy peaked lapels and a big red rose embroidered on the left breast pocket, and I like the way it emphasizes my hips and bust without making me look big. Knowing that it was technically a white-tie event, I wore a scarlet bow tie. _Take that,_ formal fashion. I'd put a streak of white in my hair with spray-on dye and then pinned it up rather nicely, considering I haven't been to a formal thing in decades. I wore my uniform boots with the spurs-they're black and look a lot like dress shoes.

Melissa had bothered to put on some kinda hideous polka-dotted dress/shorts _thing_ she calls a "romper" for her "pity date" with me, so we were already mismatched.

A band was setting up on a raised platform at one end-unfortunately, not Marceline and The Thieves. Man, next time it'll have to be us: I'd avoid this whole mess that way. Anyways, it looks like some kinda small jazz group. I didn't even know we had one.

In the center of the dance floor, a few knights had gathered around Death. They were talking about battles, and from what I overheard he was laughing and talking like he'd been at all the same ones.

Had he? Is he _literally_ death itself? Jeez, my head gets more fucked up the more I think about that guy. I'm morbidly fascinated to say the least. Anyways, he was dressed like a Mexican bandito from a Western movie, if that bandito were going to officiate a formal wedding. He had on a white tuxedo with a white bow-tie, that big white hat he wears that's almost a sombrero, black cowboy boots with big jingo-bob spurs not unlike mine, and a pair of fucking ammo belts, the kind that go to an M60. Yeah, that's Death for you.

I wondered if I was liable to walk into his invisible bus. I decided on a few likely spots and made a mental note not to walk through them.

The last few Knights arrived (with the exception of a Sir Weathersham, who was attending to an issue with her family away to the south). Sir Howell called the first dance. It was a jazz waltz like that schmaltzy Shostakovich number that Bonnie always wanted to dance to.

Dancing with Melissa was painful. She didn't just step on my toes, she moved in, like, a different time signature. Every four beats (of the three-beat dance) she tread (treaded? trod?) on one toe or the other. And she told me _I_ did it fucking wrong!

And let me go on a bit about Melissa: this woman constantly puts down her boyfriend because he (gasp!) _wants other women_. She's also convinced that anyone who likes tits must want her. And she talks about how she would naturally treat a man like a _king_ , if only a man would let her do that.

 _Fuck_. First off, from everything I've heard, Chad or whatever he's called wants other women _and_ _he doesn't sleep with them_. That's called, like, _fidelity._ If he didn't want other women, how would you _know_ he was faithful? Maybe he was actually a massive cheater on the inside, but didn't like anyone else enough to cheat.

Secondly, she's... she's Melissa Bankley, an acquired taste, I'm sure. I like tits more than the next person. I like a three-dimensional personality even more. Did you know the most attractive normal human I ever met was also a chess champion?

Third, _who fucking wants to be treated as royalty?_ I am literally a queen (if only by being the only subject) and I don't want people to grovel and serve me. I'm not crippled, I can get my own damn red paint and coffee, thank you very much. Even Bonnie doesn't _really_ want that, as much as she lets it happen. Is that what men want? I mean, it would explain some things, but I don't think it's true.

Four, _which is it?_ Are you so attractive that everyone wants you, or are you so starved for male attention that you'll grovel not even to a specific man but just some man?

So I expressed attraction (fake attraction, of course) to the great sex goddess Melissa, so now I'm fair game and she gets to use me to get back at her _terrible_ boyfriend or something. I was wrong, this has nothing to do with pity. This is pure fucking histrionic personality disorder. I've seen it plenty of times.

I'm done.

After four or... three? agonizing dances, we agreed to mingle and dance with other partners for a dance or two. I made a beeline for Death. I dunno, he gives me that feeling in my non-existent stomach. Viscera, I guess, but whatever it's called, it's sometimes a good sign.

So I cut in with him when the band struck up the next number. Things went all right untill I asked him "Hey, can I see you sometime?"

"You got to be exclusive to see Death, baby," he said, "I don't like prior attachments." He literally walked away from me on the dance floor. My fucking bassist _literally_ left me standing on the dance floor because I arrived with a girl I didn't even want to see. I mean, I've had worse but that's _fucking cold_.

In retrospect, only a few people really looked over and noticed what was happening, but it felt like every eye on the dance floor was suddenly pointed at me like a compass. I looked around feverishly, looking for some face that was at least on the sympathetic side of apathy. For a few tense moments I saw nothing of the sort.

Then I saw Susan, sitting alone away from the dance floor, crying.

I walked over to her, leaving the sinking ship of a dance behind.

"What's the matter?" I asked, or something like that.

She looked up, her face all wet and red. "I've waited two hours for this guy from health class."

I got over next to her and put my hand on her shoulder to try and comfort her.

"Sue, Sue... listen, I've been there. There are thousands of guys out there."

She got frantic and started ranting. " _And girls too and listen, they've all stood me up and dumped me and I think it's just me and at this point... and... at this point I..._ " and she trailed off, looking like she was about to bawl.

"Sue, we're both nervous wrecks," I said, getting her arm over my shoulder and helping her up. "Let's get inside somewhere.

So we went inside the garrison and found the Knights' rec room. I'd never been in before. There was a pool table and a fussball table and probably some video games hooked up to the TV, but we both just kinda collapsed onto the less nasty couch.

She pulled herself together a little. "I'm sorry I'm such a basket case over this. It just all piles up, you know?"

"It does. And never be sorry for that," I said.

"Oh, jeez," she said, adding up on the pads of her fingers and almost starting to cry again. "It must be five years since my last stable relationship."

I slid down in the couch and tried to get comfortable-not easy if you're used to being able to hover for months at a time. "You're lucky if you get one of those in twenty or thirty years," I said, then realized that it _really_ wasn't helping.

She divided on her fingers, which was something to see. "You must have had plenty in your time, then."

"Was I very lucky? Eh, probably not. I've had tons of relationships, some stable, some not; maybe two or three good ones, but not all the good ones were stable." I looked over at the bald, muscular barbarian woman in a black flamenco dress sitting next to me, and realized she was looking at me with fascination.

"You don't really want to hear me talk about... you do?" I asked and answered. "Well, my first love was named Josephine..."

 _(To be continued)_

 _Sorry about the months and months of delay. I've been working a summer job that ate up most of my time and all of my energy and left me feeling deader than Marceline. Rest assured that, now that I'm getting back into school mode, you'll see plenty of updates._

 _\- JMS_


	20. Chapter 19

_Cont'd from last update._

"My first love was named Josephine," I said, still trying to get comfortable on the rec room couch. "And it wasn't a stable relationship because it was barely a relationship at all.

"It wasn't long after the great war-decades, not centuries. People like you that could pass for basic humans were still pretty common. This was the year that they lynched the last high-ranking member of the U.S. Government for starting the war.

"I was living up on the East Coast, far from where the largest warheads landed in Georgia, Alabama and East Tennesee. Ironically, the Great Bloc had been aiming for the old capitol, D.C., which was only about seventy miles from where I was living. They missed by hundreds of miles and I, like, could never figure why.

"The town, whose name escapes me, was almost untouched. Sure, some mutants from the southern radiation zones would wander through, some would settle, and for the most part, the townsfolk were very accepting. Nobody much picked on me about my ears or my complexion. Fine by me, I was never embarassed of them anyways.

"It was a port town on the Chesapeake Bay that still ocasionally got ships from other places, so years later it was one of the East Coast targets when the Second Vampire Coalition seized control and imposed strict isolation on the continent. But for the time being it was a peaceful place.

"My adopted father had abandoned me about seventeen years before, and angsting about it was like my fucking ray-zawn daytruh or however you say that."

"The R is silent," Sue said.

I thought about it for a second. "Ay-zawn daytruh?"

"Oh, for the love of... you need a foreign language requirement, don't you?" Sue asked. "Take French. Raison d' _etre_. It's not hard to pronounce."

"I'm already taking German. Don't need it. Ray-zawn- _dayt_ , got it," I said. I kept telling my story. "So I lived in a decent apartment that I got cheap, because the smell of fish from off the port kept the rent down in the area. One day she walked in looking for a sublet, and I, like, nearly shanked her.

"She was...Jo was a vampire. I'd seen vampires do some pretty horrible things... things I don't talk about.

"So we fought, fought to a standstill, and when we couldn't fight anymore we collapsed onto a couch, sorta like this one, and talked it out. She was a refugee from the alliance that eventually became those Coalition jackwads-she was running from one powerful vampire called the Empress in particular. I forgot about fighting her after that. I let her stay with me.

"We lived together six months. In that time we started a band with my cyclops buddy Chad, put a hit single on the Indie charts based on a Hart Crane poem, and eventually, on a very cold night after a very long and emotional gig, we made love.

"We never did again-I don't think we ever even talked about it again, but I was in love, in love with her cheekbones and the deathly pallor of her skin, in love with her personality, in love with her punctuation use, in love with her soul itself. How does that Leonard Cohen song go? _'I love your spirit and your body and your clothes...?'"_

Sue shrugged.

I went on. "The next autumn, she walked into my room. She was framed for a second by the doorway, black against the lit hallway outside. Then she stepped in and light fell on one side of her face from the bare lightbulb hanging above my desk.

"Glob, Sue, I don't know how to fucking describe her in that moment. Jo was rail thin and a little taller than me. She was wonderfully handsome but not in a conventional way, without even a veneer of youth but without any age either. She had skin that was not bleached-out like mine but a sort of bloodless grey with light freckles that still gave the appearance of a living but anemic human woman. Her eyes were watery blue, but they got dark rings in them when she'd fed on blood. _Ferrous sulfide_ , she said, and licked her lips.

"She had a high, aristocratic face with pronounced cheekbones, fangs less like any other vampire and more like George Harrison. When she smiled it was a one-sided, melancholic smile. She was the only woman I ever liked bobbed hair on, when it curled out and lost its shape and became organic. Glob, I'm not making her sound good, am I? What do you call it when all the elements are wrong but you add it all up and it's right?"

Sue didn't answer, so I went on. "When she stepped into the half-light that night, wearing all black, I thought I was watching one of those movies where every frame was planned meticulously in every detail. Have you ever seen 'Citizen Kane,' Sue?"  
Sue bit her lip. "Umm... I don't know what any of those things are."

"What things?"

"Mo-vies? Citizen Kane? Any of it."

"It's not important. Fuck, it sorta is. Like a photograph that you spend forever staging, with the light and shadows just right?"

"Of course," Sue said. "Flash fill, diffused lighting, incident light metering... I took a course in photography."

"Yeah, exactly. The same idea. She looked like a staged photograph... she often looked like a staged photograph and I have no idea how you do that. But that's beside the point. She stepped in and looked perfect and she asked me if I would join her army.

"'Yeah,' I said, 'of course! Wait, what? What army?'

"'I'm collecting as many people as I can to join the rebellion against the Empress. The dark web has been astir for months, and I only just broke the codes the rebellion are using. Everyone who opposes the new alliance of the radical vampires is assembling in Indiana and Michigan in Mid-October to form one decisive alliance. I think we'll all die but at least we might kill enough of them to make a difference.'

"'Jo, why us?' I asked. 'We could go anywhere, we could get out before it's too late. What are we going to do that's going to make a difference?'

"'Thirty years ago, I gave up on ever having children, the same day I gave up walking in sunlight, smoking and eating solid food. I'm a vampire, and that means I am utterly without any ability to add life back into the world, and believe me, I've taken life, Marce. If I can take this life I have into my hands and make some slight net positive out of it, I have to. A single grain among thousands can tip the balance. And I... no. Never mind, I'll tell you later,' she said, and gave me this look. Glob, this look."

"What happened?" Sue asked.

"We joined the Last Rebellion against the Coalition. You've had ancient history classes, haven't you?"

"The _Autumn_ Rebellion?"

"It was in the Autumn. I said October, didn't I? September, I mean. Mid-September."

" _The_ Autumn Rebellion?" she asked again. "The war that no one on the side of the Rebellion survived?"

"Here I am. I did," I said, gesturing sadly to myself. "Jo, Chad and I were in a stolen tank that we were using to scout ahead of the main force. We rolled it into the burnt-out wreckage of Kansas City late one night, and Chad was up top using a night-vision goggle to look for hostiles. Suddenly there came a bright light and a sound like all the thunder ever, piled up into one moment. Chad jumped down through the hatch with tears streaming from his eye. In the weird light of the inside of the tank, he looked almost like a cartoon drawing of a cyclops.

"'Massive nuclear explosion maybe thirty, forty clicks due east,' he said, in an utterly defeated voice. 'They just bombed us. _That's us._ We're dead. The entire army would have been within the blast radius.'

"Jo checked the tank's external geigers. 'Seal the hatch,' she shouted all of the sudden. 'And turn on the air scrubbers and the recirc. That was a full-scale H-bomb set for high yield, and we were close. We're receiving direct radiation and the heavier fallout can't be far behind.'

"The cloud was bigger than my thumb, Jo,' Chad said. 'We're dead too.'

"'Not with this tank around us,' Jo said. 'It was built during the Cold War. We could have survived a lot closer to ground zero given fair warning. Also, you have womanly thumbs, Charles. We'll pull through.'

"But she was wrong about the tank, or we didn't seal it quick enough. We got these sores all over-mine and Chad's were all bloody. I guess that's radiation poisoning. Jo would heal hers with her vampire powers, and they'd come right back. Chad got it worst of all. He nearly wasted away and died, but we held it together and limped out of the radiation zone with whatever fuel and rations we had left. We were starving and still sick by the time Jo let us open the hatch, a week and a half and sixty miles later. I poked my head out and looked around. It was dusk and we were somewhere west of Kansas City, wrecked cars all around us on the cracked freeway.  
"And suddenly I was being pulled out of the tank by, like, an occult hand."

"A what?"

"Sorry, I was having a flashback to my days as a gonzo journalist. It was as if this invisible force had grabbed me by the shoulders and _yanked_ me out of the hatch. I banged both my shins pretty badly on the way out. The next thing I knew, the force threw me away and I was hitting the pavement twenty feet from the tank. Thankfully I didn't bang my head, but I was pretty scraped up. Next came Chad, only our invisible friend threw him to the pavement too. Finally, we started to hear what sounded like a real catfght inside the tank, and not a dignified one like you and me could have, Sue.

"I mean it sounded like two women had suddenly become animals inside that tank. Slapping, smacking, scratching, accusations... and finally a strange female figure scrambled up out of the tank and, before I could get a look at her, she vanished-I mean she turned completely invisible in a split second."

"There's a spell for that. Sir Howell says it's cowardly and base, though," Sue said.

"I can do it, it just takes hella energy. Anyways, this woman jumps out of the tank and vanishes, and right after her comes Jo, who looked like hell. I'd kill that woman just for doing what she did to Jo's face, let alone what came next.

"Suddenly, those invisible hands grabed my shoulders again and this weird bitch appeared in front of me. She had, like, a weird hood over her eyes, with a ruby eye in it, and a snake wrapped around her neck. And the snake... I swear I'm sober, Sue."

"I wasn't thinking anything like that."

"And the snake pulls the hood up to show her real eyes. There were huge and they just drew your soul into them like some kind of vortex. And then she started chanting 'sell your soul to the skies; surrender to the Empress' Eyes.' And she had complete control over me. I don't know how, but I know this tranch could have told me anything and I would have done it, as soon as the last word of that spell was out of her mouth.

"Chad must have thought quickly, beause the next thing I know, he's up behind the Empress with a knife, and he stabs her in the back. The spell over me was broken instantly.

"She swung around and shouted 'Again with the stabbing me in the back! You'd think some of you donks would wise up to the fact that you can't kill a vampire by stabbing-'

"She trailed off. She realized that she had her hood up, meaning that Chad was already hypnotized and probably not even listening. So she says her dumb little rhyme again, and Chad is her willing slave. I'm trying to stop her this whole time, but she just ignored my attacks.

"Chad killed Jo. I can't describe it, but Chad killed Jo and I killed Chad and the Empress was nowhere to be found. The rebellion was over and North America was under the heel of the vampires.

"Later I found out that I could have snapped Chad out of it fairly easily, but Sue, I didn't know."  
Sue sat there with her mouth open.

"I cradled Jo's body in my arms for hours, and sat there on rock bottom. Everything I had to live for was gone. My little town, the ersatz country I was a citizen of, my way of life, the love of my life... all gone."

"I killed my first vampire that day. Just a foot-soldier, but for a while, that was my purpose. Just killing... and killing. I lived to kill vampires. A vampire enslaved my adoptive father, and a vampire killed the woman I love; probably the same one."

"Whoa," Sue said. "I'm... so sorry."

"Some wounds heal, others don't," I said, trying and failing to sound happy-go-lucky. "I mostly live for music now, so there's that."  
There was an awkward silence.

"You told me about your first love. Can I tell you about mine?"

"Of course," I said. It was now about ten o' clock, but I wasn't tired and she didn't seem drowsy either.

"My first love was a mighty warrior..." she said.

 _(To be continued)_


	21. Chapter 20

**Hey guys, can you believe that this is Chapter 20? I sure can't. Since it's a bit of an anniversary, I thought I might let you in on a little secret: I didn't plan any of this. I started writing this as a Marceline/Bubblegum slashfic literally years ago, and when I first began publishing it on Fanfiction dot net, I didn't have any inkling of the characters I was going to introduce or the plot that's beginning to unfold. In the weeks and months ahead I'm going to start hitting pretty heavily on some of the main plot points, and there's going to be everything from Gothic horror to (moderate levels of) body horror. I'd just like to commit now to always providing trigger warnings when they might be necessary before some of the darker content.**

 **P.S, don't pick on me if I accidentally contradict something that happened in the most recent episodes! I haven't seen them yet. Actually, it might be a while before I can bring myself to watch them.**

 **Best, J. M. Stanton.**

(Cont'd)

"My first love was a mighty warrior," Sue said. "In the Sagas of the North, they tell of only three greater fighters: Nate, who fought giants, dragons, and an evil forest-"

"An evil forest?" I asked.

"He fought in the forest maze for twelve days without sleeping. And Shamiqua, who did battle with an army of vampires single-handed-"

"Ooh, me too!"

"...this is kind of a big deal in my culture, telling stories the right way."

"Oh. Okay."

"-And Bob, who even now fights a demon lord these seven centuries, for the fate of us all. My lover was a mighty and famous warrior, whose feats are told of in the Sagas alongside even the deeds of Bob."

I suppressed a laugh.

"My lover was fearsome with a broad axe, a slayer of knights and a hunter of beasts, who met with fear and spit in its face on the fields of the Kings! My lover was a poet, who added three thousand and twenty-three lines to the Sagas, and every one is studied by school children as models of the very best verse. Oh, _the Sagas_ : Think of what you call death metal, but with more violins and the skulls of your enemies are used as drums sometimes: that is how we perform the Sagas.

"And the best poets of the land added to the Sagas when my lover died, telling of her wars and her death and her wooing of many princes-"

"You didn't say it was a woman!" I said.

"...Is there something I'm doing wrong? Apparently, I come across as straight in your culture. I am very... butch, yes? And I have very butch interests. In my culture these are sometimes signs of being not-straight, and I thought they were in yours as well."

"Well, yes," I said. "But, um... how do I say this? We- I mean I-don't like to assume things. It's very impolite in our culture to assume one way or the other. And I guess I... I guess I thought that most people in the Northlands were into those things."

"Of course they are! But I more than most! Do you know how many women go to war in my culture?"

I took a stab in the dark. "Not very many?"

"Almost all of them. Do you know how many enjoy it as much as me?"

"Almost all of them?"

"Not very many!" she said, grinning. "Pay attention! I like soft men and hard women, and between the two _there is no comparison!_ "

I wondered if I counted as "hard," whatever that means.

"Now where was I?" Sue said. "My lover was the leader of the Kings' armies, the highest ranking soldier in all three Kingdoms of the North; from Mount Lohg to Kyubek. I was ten years younger when I met her, an unnamed teenager-"

"-Unnamed?"

"You don't get born with a name, do you?"

"Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I changed mine a little when I was young. I just wasn't a 'Marcelina.'"

"No, that's absurd! In the North you have to earn a name in battle or by poetic prowess. Stop interrupting," she said, laughing. "I was her saddle-bearer and bondswoman-like an intern around here. And she taught me the ways of war.

"This was around the time that Worm-ass the Inexorable, the Terrible, came down out of the high western mountains. Worm-ass… _Yes,_ he was actually called Worm-ass! He came down with his armies and claimed half a province for his own land, so we could hardly stand by; we had to fight to reclaim what was ours.

"We rode ten days; the warriors formed the van on mighty horses and we bondservants rode behind on hardy mules, carrying the heavy armor, the axes, the pikes, the partizans, the… I think I'll skip a bit.

"Battle was met. Shields were split."

 _The passive voice was used_ , I thought. I kept it to myself.

"It was on a snow-covered field in a deep valley, where not a raven circled to feast on the dead. Our line began to break through, but Worm-ass's men had shields that covered them from above their head to below the knees, and they joined the shields together with hooks and eyes to form a wall. They pushed against us with all their might, one pushing on another and the front line pushing on their shields."

I knew what she was describing. I've seen that kind of thing used.

"My lover issued the command. Much of our distilled mead was sacrificed to do it, but the soldiers made firebombs and lobbed them over the wall of shields and bodies.

"Into that flaming chaos a few heroes broke through and strode triumphant, loosing souls from bodies and heads from… shoulders. Among them was my darling, my hero, _mo ghile mear._ From a hill I watched as she fought Worm-ass himself – they say the commanders always find each other."

"This is true," I said.

"And though my heart broke, though the sky turned black, though tears in my eyes magnified the distances and blocked my sight, I couldn't look away as she fell, white steel in her chest, red steel out her back. _Hwaet! These days are not good days,_ I cried aloud _, when heroes die and ruins dot the earth._ But my feet moved with a will not my own, as though the spirit of a powerful hero possessed my body-"

She was interrupted by the worst sound in the world. The bomb siren was kept in a little building about thirty feet away from the rec-room window, for reference. So when it went off, we knew about it probably a little _before_ it happened, it was so _fupping_ loud.

We were in armor and out in the garrison yard within one hundred seconds. As we stepped into the yard, I saw one of the knights, a very big humanoid called Sir Hyatt, throw something into the air.

The place was still lit from the party, and the Knights all formed up—all of us were in armor, but some of the others wouldn't have passed inspection. Getting in armor drunk is a bitch, but I have the advantage of experience.

Sir Howell, striding in front of the square once again, was still in his parade armor from the party, shiny gold plates with ridiculous shoulder pads and a helmet that had a crest like a rooster's comb. He had one of his magical shields, though, and he held his sword in the ready position, flaming brightly in the half-darkness. He held his shield up and tabled it.

Suddenly, Dr. Mungey fell out of the sky and Howell caught him on his shield. He whispered something to Howell, and Howell helped him down.

"This Billy character has returned with an army of flame elementals," Howell shouted, chuckling in an unsettling way. "He'll be here in at most two hours, according to our latest aerial recon. We must defend this bastion of education at all costs-"

" _Wrong,_ " said another little jelly mutant in a yellow sports-coat who had just appeared behind him. The man stepped up and talked to Sir Howell, but kept his voice where we could all hear him. "This is twenty-second-century thinking, Mr. Howell. We are no longer the only institute of learning in Ooo; we no longer have the need or the right to defend this complex by military force. You are ordered to negotiate with Billy. If necessary, I will take control of the situation and dismiss you back to the garrison."

Sir Howell swore. It was the first time I'd ever heard him swear, except once when he'd dropped a helmet on his toe. He put an "H" after the "F" in a way that was new to me.

"I must ask you to use ideologically correct language, Mr. Howell," the little man said. "This is a civil institution and we must try to act civilized. No more of your swearing like a pirate and using force... well, _like a pirate_."

"Alright, dammit, let's get a few things straight, Mr... _Thaddeus, was it_?" Sir Howell said. He spoke very rapidly and gestured with his shield. "First, there is no other independent and free school like the Lyceum, and if this light goes out the continent will be darker. To defend that independence is paramount over the politics of the moment, over the worth of a few lives. I have seen many fads, Thaddeus, some of them called things like 'republic' and 'empire,' but I have only seen one Lyceum. _Lux lucens._ "

Just when I thought he was done, he took a deep breath and began railing at the little man even harder. " _Second,_ you are not my employer, my husband or my friend, and even my husband called me Sir when he was on my fighting side. You shall call me ' _Sir_ Howell,' because I have earned it. If you absolutely will not call me 'Sir,' you must call me ' _Dr._ ,' because I earned that one too—in _library science_ , dammit. Where was I?"

"Only one Lyceum?" the man suggested, with a punchably smug tone of voice.

Sir Howell calmed down a little. "You, _Mr._ Thaddeus, do not dictate university policy. You are, what, vice president of the Student Government? A glorified _prefect_. Run along and let _real_ faculty and _real_ students do what must be done, young man."

Thaddeus didn't take the insult. He just said, in a calm, even tone, "I'm afraid I have orders from the Chancellor," as he took out a scroll with the official seal of the university.

Sir Howell said some hilarious, vile things about Thaddeus' mother and some other relatives, as the jelly mutant made a big show of handing him the paper. He looked over it and got quiet.

"Well," he said at last, loud enough that all the Knights could hear him. "they've gotten to the SGA, they've gotten to scholarship office and soon they'll have us too, and we'll just enforce their damn rules over the students like private police."

He went on. "The order is to negotiate and to hand over Sir Marceline to the enemy if it becomes necessary. This is not acceptable. We will hold within the campus gate and passively block Billy from entering, protecting this woman, until the SGA or some other arm of the Chancellor drags us from the gate by force, or until rivulets of my blood run among the cobblestones like so much summer rain, after which I severely doubt you youngsters will fight on. At least you are drunk, and there's courage in ethanol. I, for my part, am very drunk! Form _up!_ "

"But I must protest," barked the little man.

"Useless to protest if you cannot speak," Sir Howell said, chuckling. Without looking over at him, he held up a hand, fingers spread, palm towards the little man.

The words died in the guy's mouth; nothing he said could be heard. I knew the spell. It's a fairly easy one.

"I'm sorry," Howell said. "Free speech is sacred to me, but I have lost patience with you. I will release you from the hex and do penance later."

We marched to the gatehouse and formed up in the gate, as densely as ten drunk students halfway into mismatching plate armor can make themselves in a gate twenty feet wide. I thought some chilling thoughts while standing there in the half-darkness, waiting for battle.

I was used to my own kind trying to kill me. _Vampire was to vampire more hateful than a foe_ , in the old days. But the university was something new to me, something that presented itself as a mother, _alma mater_ , you know, and it was kind of soul-crushing to realize that it was totally fucking trying to kill me to save its own ass. Like, who or what _doesn't_ have it in for me?

My head spun, and in total it spun for about an hour and fifteen minutes as I stood there with the others in the gate. Fire appeared in the distance, coming up the mountain, and I tasted adrenaline in my mouth. What could we even do if we couldn't draw swords or attack?

Five more minutes and I could see the idiot's face as he marched. Behind him were about two dozen flame-dudes.

It was then that about a dozen teachers showed up with swords, axes and what I took for working firearms.

"We're the motherfucking Deans of the School and we order you to defend this place!" Foxham shouted, waving a hatchet that was rather large for him. "What can they do, fire us? We're... _tenurrrrrrrred_ ~!"

What followed was, (and I know, I'm a military historian and famous war hero,) the only time the word "tenured" has ever come to mean "CHARGE!"

So all the deans and all the Knights of the Heroic Lyceum ran like crazy mondo motherfuckers at the enemy. Swords came out flaming, and in one voice the Knights chanted the charm that turns sword-flame to sword-ice.

Want to have fun? Heat a knife cherry-red with a blow torch and cut some butter. That's what it was like. I must have deincarnated about six of the fire guys by the time it was all over.

The field outside the gate was black as my soul when it was all done. Bits of fire elementals' armor lay strewn about, and Billy had escaped, no one saw where to.

Inside, we were met by almost the entire SGA and the fat man. He looked bizarre standing up, and he was still eating peanuts. The halogen floodlights made his pasty face look dead and bloated.

"That does it! _BLATANT INSUBORDINATION!_ " he barked in a hollow voice. "Fired, the lot of you fired, expelled et cetera, FULL _STO_ - _HOP_!"

I felt a deathly chill.

Foxham looked at him. Calmly, as though all his life had prepared him, he said "no."

" _HHHWHAT?_ "

"You heard me. We're the deans, man. We elect and dismiss your position. Who signs your paychecks? The Bursar, who happens to be me. Who do you report to on matters of education? The Dean of Students, also me. You handed me the gun, I'm firing it. You're done, fella."

The fat man reached fever pitch. "I FOUNDED this university. _Ab universitate condita sum cancellarius! De lege sum!_ "

" _Sed non_. The Thirteen founded the university, and you are only one of them. Hey, guys, back me up here. All opposed to firing him? Dammit, it's him or us."

None of the other deans moved or said anything.

"The nays have it," Foxham said.

"I AM-" Charlie began.

He trailed off, because most of the Knights had circled up around him with frozen swords.

Slowly, he walked towards the gate and the crowd parted to let him out. As he stood in the archway, he strained to look over his massive shoulder.

"I will bury you," he said, calmly, and vanished in a puff of smoke.

" _Nikita Kruschev, 1956_ ," Foxham said, and shrugged. He walked off, the interim Chancellor of the last university in the world, a singed fox with a hatchet and a cigarette. Later I found out that he put the hatchet in the edge of the fat man's desk and gave the office to Donovan with the provision that she leave it there.

* * *

So me and Sue sat on the couch and tended each other's wounds. In the battle, she had jumped between me and a raging, large fire elemental. Her face was red where flames had entered her helmet and her left eye was swollen shut. I rubbed some patent ointment on it, feeling sure that it didn't do anything, but feeling sure that she needed it and so did I.

She made a valiant attempt to stitch up a glancing wound to my foot, where a sword split my boot, but with one eye, it wasn't happening. So I pulled out the stitch-and-a-half she'd managed to run and concentrated very hard. I thought I was going to have an aneurysm, but I managed to heal the wound.

I felt very sleepy. Sue put her arm around me and I leaned against her. "So how does the story end?"

"We lost the battle, I got wounded, Worm-Ass died of his wounds later, after pillaging three more towns, and in the end, a lot of us had to give up our names."

"But not you."

"No. I named myself that day. No one sings my name and no one knows it among my people. I am the first one who has ever named herself, I think."

"You named yourself after your lover," I said in a leap of intuition. I guess I didn't stay awake long enough to hear if I was right.


	22. Chapter 21

**April 14th, 2987**

 **Weather: Sunny f/16**

 **Mood: Good**

 **Music: Joni Mitchell – People's Parties / Same Situation**

Sup, diary.

Well, the band's on hiatus, or at least, Death is temporarily out of it. Turns out he was _roaringly_ drunk last night, however that works. He won't say it, but he regrets what he said. Anyways, with Charlie the unkillable Chancellor gone, he doesn't have much reason to stay. Fuck, I had completely forgotten that he was here to kill somebody. He left me his number for whenever Sue and LSP and I wanted to jam. It's not going to be right now, I can tell you that, diary. If anything, he should have had _more_ time to learn how to hold his liquor.

Sue and I are probably going steady. Glob, I hate it when I can't tell. I have seduced queens, married a princess, been the love-slave and scullion of a wizard, and at least one religion worships me as a minor sex god in their fupping pantheon because I taught that thing to that priestess. I should, like, be able to tell if we're going steady.

We haven't had a date. I define a date as something where you could potentially go Dutch. It's an important hoop to jump through, the first time the waiter asks you "together or separate," because there are four options* and which one ends up happening tells you a lot about the dynamic your relationship might have. It really sets the tone. It's also very important to discretely notice how much the other person tips.

* _The fourth option is to dine and dash._

But we've had two outings (not counting the time in the Wasteland with J.D. and the ghost), and they both went, like, really well, and… you'll see.

So the first outing was talking for hours about love and heartbreak and falling asleep together on a couch. If it had followed a first date I'd be ready to declare it "going steady" right there.

The second was this morning.

We woke up. Now, I'm operating on the following sleep schedule: I go for days, sometimes hallucinating because I can't fucking sleep, finally I hit the bed like a ton of bricks and get a few dreamless hours of restless sleep, and so on.

But we both woke up on that same couch around nine-thirty, and I had just dreamed about my apartment in Saint Michaels, Maryland. (Why couldn't I think of "Saint Michaels" earlier?) I haven't dreamed since… it was before I started this volume. Sometime in volume seventy-six, I think, assuming this is seventy-eight. I'd need to see my bookshelf to know for sure.

I felt fantastic before I opened my eyes. The left side of my face was up against Sue's arm, and I think I must have woken her when I moved my head.

The first thing I noticed was that she was awake and looking at me pleasantly, if a little blankly. Part of her face was still red, but the swelling had gone down and her eye was fine. The second thing I noticed was that we were both still in little more than nightshirts and chain-mail chausses over tights, and there was a surgical kit scattered on the floor from where she had tried to stitch my foot.

I gave a look that said "follow me," and got up off the couch. In all actuality, my joints felt like shit from the battle, but I used a little magical assist.

Now, I could have floated the whole way, but I haven't slept this long in months; I'm not going to squander all this energy.

So she followed me and we snuck into the garrison kitchen, where I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. Thankfully, she turned out to be a woman of simple tastes, and I managed to make bacon and eggs without burning anything. We sat down at the kitchen table, her with the food and me with about six smallish tomatoes. She looked with interest as I sucked one and then another till they were grey. I threw them over my shoulder into the trash without looking. She turned back to the bacon and devoured three strips in about three seconds.

We ended up in her dorm room, where at about nine one of us had the idea to go shoot some pictures together.

She showed me her camera that she was issued in photography class. I guess she bought it out at the end? Anyways, it's a recent knockoff of one of the old prewar Olympus cameras, with the battery pack and everything. I don't know why anyone would reverse-engineer one of those, but okay. I took the lens off, looked through it. It looked cheap. Believe me, I can tell.

"Do you… get good results with this?"

"Eh. They had better lenses in the photography building."

"Next time I run home I'll take the lens off my old OM-2."

"Oh, I couldn't!"

"Nonsense. The shutter on mine rotted. I might have a telephoto and some wide lenses for that kind of camera too. I totally insist."

So I ran up to the third floor to get my camera. The one I chose to bring with me from home was a pre-war Praktica that I've rebuilt over a dozen times. I actually snuck into the candy kingdom and cut a strip off of PB's drapes to replace the shutter curtains once. It wasn't the best fabric for the job, but it was after the first divorce…

Then there was the film. Now, in the old days, they had machines that made film cheaply and quickly. I think they have one here in the photo department, but it must be in bad shape or something, because Sue had said before that the film is hit or miss. The wizards make film too, but their film is a little… different. It all has spells on it, and with the cheap stuff you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you take a picture of a wall and there's a splotch in the print where you can see clean through the wall. Sometimes you get one where everyone's clothing turns invisible. Other times you see spirits, auras or those weird extradimensional dudes that you can see if you have wizard eyes. (Thank Grod mine mostly went away after I stopped seeing Ash.) Other times it just doesn't turn out. Luckily you only have to develop magic film in a potion of lemon juice and orichalcum powder. I guess it's equal parts alchemy, chemistry and conjuring, although the three, like, sorta fade into each other if you really get into the stuff that's involved.

The best film is, I reluctantly admit, the stuff Bonnibel makes in her lab. I got her into film photography back in the day. She did a chemical analysis on some film I had from the Iowan Imperium, said "I can improve this," and a month later she was exporting the stuff.

Hers has colors like the old slide film if you shoot it right, bizarre-ass colors if you shoot it wrong, and it doesn't need developing at all; you just peel it apart in the darkroom and you end up with a positive strip and a negative strip.

I had two rolls of Candychrome, a roll of Magic Roulette no. 9, and some black-and-white film from Iowa that was in my freezer for centuries.

I gave Sue one of the Candychromes and some of the black-and-white and shoved the rest of the film in my pocket; we'd divvy it up later. For her part, Sue pulled out some of the university film and gave two rolls to me. _Equal exchange_ , I thought. We'd probably have split the bill evenly if we went out right now. You know, I guess there are a lot more than four ways it can go when the waiter asks you "together or separate."

So then I put on my sunhat and we went outside.

That day we went up way into the mountains, taking pictures of birds, trees, the campus from high above, and each other, laughing at each other's jokes and getting that feeling that teenagers call love and I call hormones mostly. Maybe there's no difference, and when you're in it you sure don't feel like there is.

We came to this place about one o' clock. I'd know if I'd been wearing my watch from Simon. There was a perfect, evenly-spaced circle of trees in the middle of the forest, with a clearing inside. That means one of, like, three things. Either some guy thought it would be cool and planted trees in a circle and then cleared out the middle, and not too long ago, either, because there were no saplings or anything in the clearing, or there's a magic spell on the forest to make it grow that way, or this is one of _those places._

Those places uniformly suck butt. There are like, three or four primal planes in the dimension we inhabit. There's the material plane, like we all live on, there's the Nightosphere, where people go if dad likes them, supposedly there's a good-aligned version of the Nightosphere that's made out of clouds and shit, and lastly there's Fairyland.

Man, fairies suck butt too. They steal your children and replace them with little fairies that grow up, fuck you up and go off trailing chaos in their wake, not necessarily in that order. Time doesn't pass the same in their plane, so if you get pulled there, you could spend what feels like a day there, and come back and find that there's been a nuclear war and a sexy pink fascist made of sugar rules most of America. Seriously, I've met people who've had that experience.

If this sounds like some Mother Goose bull-dunk, it's because it totally is. People have known this forever, it's just that people don't listen to their mothers and what starts as a warning turns into a happy little bedtime story by the third or fourth generation.

Well, whenever there's a ring of mushrooms or trees or something, it's very possible that you're in one of those places that exist in both planes, here and in Fairyland.

So naturally my first response was to walk right in and start taking pictures. There was this old stone well peeking through the high grass in the center of the circle that looked really cool, and I walked right up to it

Sue must not have known about fairies, because she didn't seem to think anything of the ring of trees, and she came in too. A minute later smoke started pouring out of my camera. I opened it up and the Magic Roulette film was turning to some kinda gas right before my eyes. It looked cool, but that stuff's not as cheap as I make it sound, so I was kind of mad. Then I put 2, 6 and 8 together and decided that maybe we better get out of the fairy ring.

"Sue," I said. "This is not a good place. I'll explain in about five minutes, but first I need you to do as I do. Come on, let's back out of here slowly."

"Got it," she whispered.

Suddenly, a motherfucking fairy appeared. You're probably imagining a sprite, with little wings and a cute little hat. No, this is Final Fantasy boss material type-a deal. She was tall, slightly translucent and unbelievably attractive, with cheekbones that shouldn't be physically possible (probably aren't, in fact), eyes that glowed with their own light, and platinum hair that floated all around, defying gravity without getting all frizzy like mine would if I let it float around. She had a sword and not much else. In old stories, the fair knight (and let me say, I'm as fair as they come) tends to mistake the fairy for the Virgin Mother of God, whatever that means, and I can see how.

Actually, she kinda looked like… Joni Mitchell. Which is probably the same thing, don't get me wrong.

" _There's nane that comes to the circle-wood, but leaves for me a wad_ ," she recited in a sing-song voice, faintly Scottish-accented, that managed to sound both ethereal and unbelievably annoying. I felt oddly like I knew the other half of the rhyme.

She went on, " _Either rings or kirtles grene, or else thir maidenhead_."

Yeah, I knew that. It's from an old ballad that I found in one of my textbooks. It's not quite verbatim, but it's close.

She lept forward with superhuman grace.

I turned to run.

After a few paces I stopped dead in my tracks. A deathly chill had gone through me, and I looked down to see a huge translucent sword sticking out of my stomach and clean through my shirt.

"Shit," I said, and then I realized that I couldn't feel anything but the chill, no pain or anything. I looked where I was standing and realized that I was just outside the circle. Her sword seemed to get even more translucent when it passed outside the ring and seemed completely immaterial too.

She didn't seem like she could leave the circle herself, because she stabbed me two more times in the back, but I stepped out of her reach and turned around.

"Hssssssss," she said, leaning on the invisible wall with both hands. She looked far less beautiful and graceful now, as though she'd faded too in every way when she approached the edge of her universe.

"Did that sword do anything?" I asked.

"Just you wait, mortal child," she sang, and waved goodbye in the most irritatingly precious way possible.

I flipped her off, and Sue tried to stab her with a knife, but she vanished, and I stopped Sue from entering the circle.

I lifted up my shirt. "There's no wound. Her weapon was harmless outside the circle, but probably deadly inside. Sue, I could have fucking died. There needs to be warning signs or something."

"Indeed, friend."

* * *

So we went back and told Sir Howell. He looked at the two of us, still mostly in what we woke up in, with cameras around our necks. He looked from one to the other and chuckled. He knew the score.

"Fairyland, huh? dark business. Really chaotic and dark business with no good way around it. In the old days, must be seven hundred years now, when I was just a probational knight, the university was under threat from them. We rode into a fairy circle a mile wide in the plains at the foot of this mountain range. That was their staging ground.

"But then," he went on, "we never found the other side. We rode three days and four nights and at dawn on the fourth day, we found their city. They surrounded us, killed the old General of the Order and took us a short distance into the forest—no more than five minutes at a stroll—and there we were in the fairy circle again."

"And yet we are still here," Sue said.

"Our recent ex-chancellor announced at the next meeting of the university council that he had solved the problem. They asked him how; none of them could believe it. He stammered something about how he hired the wizards, but we all knew that that was made up on the spot. I have no clue how he did it.

"Well," he went on, "thank you for bringing this to my attention. We may have a serious problem and I want to inform Steven right away."

"Steven?" I asked.

"Yes, you know," Howell said, looking up from where he was lighting a stick of Nag Champa. "He talks about you often."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Chancellor Foxham."

* * *

Then we went to my dorm room and developed the film we'd shot.

The Candychrome turned out to be a little overexposed, so we got some weird colors, but there was a great one Sue took of me sitting under a tree about to bite an apple. The apple had turned bright pink, almost Peebs' shade of pink, and somehow the color kind of bled to my face and I looked almost human.

Sue took the ones we liked off to the photo department to get enlarged, and I sat here and wrote all this down.

Now I feel like laying down for a minute… Oof, I don't feel good at all.


	23. Chapter 22

**April 17th, 2987**

 **Weather: howdafuh should I know?**

 **Mood: As well as might be expected**

 **Music: Some sort of beeping monitor**

 **Dear Diary:**

Remind me not to walk into any more fairy circles or… y'know, do anything else, ever again. I woke up this afternoon in a hospital bed in Wizard City, feeling chilly even by my low standards. A nurse in a chair next to the door looked up from a copy of "Reflections in a Glass Eye," saw that I was awake, and went scurrying to fetch Bob James. Dr. James, I guess, only no one calls him that.

He came in, realized he was still smoking a cigarette, and stubbed it out on the wallpaper. A little shower of ashes ran down the wall.

"How are you feeling today, Normie?" he asked. I took it as a term of endearment and ran with that.

"Like I'm _re_ -dead. Oh, shit. I have—had class today!" Something told me that I had missed class. I looked around and found the clock. It said 4:00 and it sure as hell didn't mean "AM," so I definitely had.

"And yesterday, and the day before. Don't worry, your teachers and your drill instructor all know and all your absences so far are excused."

"What happened to me?"

"Believe me, I've been trying to find out for three days. Have you noticed a lack of your regular… um… monthly…. uh?"

"I don't have one. I'm undead. Wait, _why?_ "

"Just a stab in the dark. There's something on your MRI that I can't explain. You remember how you barely show up on the machine and all of your organs are weird-looking? Hell if I know why. Well, listen, there's a splotch on the MRI in your lower stomach. I had wondered if that's what it looks like when your species are pregnant.

I laughed involuntarily. "There is literally nothing more impossible!"

"Well Jeezus, I don't know then."

"I do. I was stabbed through the stomach with some sort of magical weapon by a fairy!"

"Your friend told me. But I consulted magical experts! They told me that should have been harmless as long as you were outside the ZOI—sorry, that's the 'Zone of Interchange.' It's what PhD's in magic call fairy circles. Dunno why. Anyways, I'm going to examine you and keep you under observation for a little while, but your vitals have been strong and there doesn't seem to be anything else wrong with you besides the blotch and the whole… coma thing."

I stood up. "Probably just exhaustion. I'll tell you if I feel bad again."

" _Sit down._ You just laid down for a nap and slept most of three days. For your own good you're not going anywhere until… tomorrow. Let's say late tomorrow. That's pushing it, but if you still feel fine by five in the afternoon tomorrow I'm not going to hold you. I'll contact your teachers at once, or you can, whichever you prefer."

And that, diary, seemed to be that.

* * *

About half-an-hour later, Sue came in, wearing her sword with athletic shorts and a Sublime t-shirt, and I was suddenly feeling some more of those… hormones. She didn't say anything at first.

Under her arm was a manila envelope.

"Here to bust me out?" I said.

"I heard you were awake. I brought the prints."

Most of them weren't fantastic, I guess. I'm not great at judging light, and she's great at it but knows next-to-nothing about composition.

But there was one. You have to pretty bad for there not to be _one._ We had set her camera on a stump with a piece of bark under the lens to support it and set the timer. She'd never used the timer, so we didn't know how long we had. I started counting down from ten.

So then we went and sat together with our backs to the tree. Nothing happened when I said "zero," so I turned to her and she smiled at me… isn't that a Led Zeppelin song? And then with neither of us looking into the camera, we heard that harsh click of the mirror hitting the roof of the camera.

Like, on a totally detached, photographic level, it's a mediocre shot. It doesn't have a lot of contrast. I think her camera was set wrong for the type of film, which was century-old black-and-white from Iowa. And it's not very well composed. It's kind of slanted, and I don't like whatcha callem, Dutch angles.

But there, with her arm around my shoulder and both of us in night-shirts and chain-mail, there crystallized in silver inside the negative and there, on the two glossy digital prints, is the only picture of me, as an adult, happy.

I mean, shit, there probably aren't many of Sue smiling, either.

But what a little thing: it turns out that the timer runs twelve seconds, not ten. Only sometimes it doesn't, because it's a very poor copy with some loose wires and shit. But there, in the gap between ten and twelve I was fucking happy, and so was she. How easily it could've not happened.

That night she wouldn't leave. She actually threatened the nurses with a flaming fupping broadsword. She must've kept watch the entire night.

* * *

Three wise men visited me the next day while I was waiting to be released. I have no idea what that means.

First there was Sir Howell. He told me that he'd do his best to make sure I got to make up any tests I missed. He excused me from drill for as long as necessary.

"One last thing: You've earned a wound badge in combat last Saturday. That goes on your armor. Are you happy with the coat you were wearing at the time? I'll have it appliquéd now if you like."

"I'd like that very much. It's whatever women's Size 2 doesn't have the chausses with it. Those are them over there on the chair, by the way."

"It was in the rec room. You were very tired Saturday night, or Sunday morning, hell if I know," the old man chuckled. "I was drunk. By the way, I understand you were in the rec room when the siren went off. If I had my way, I'd give you a second wound badge for that."

He chuckled out of the room with my chausses under his arm, probably thinking he was doing me a favor by reuniting them with the armor they belonged to. From that point I had no pants within in a ten-mile's radius.

Then came Dr. Foxham.

"I have studied the archives of the Akashic maps," he said. That's a groovy thing to start a conversation with.

"They're real?" I asked.

"Maybe not in the sense you're thinking of. The wizards and the Grand Librarian of the Lyceum maintain these master charts, alright? And then every year the current charts are imprinted onto the magical fabric of the world at a one-to-one scale, holographically…"

"Holographically?"

"So that any part of the master chart is an image of the whole. Anywhere you are, you can pull up a local or global map in your inner eye, if you know such and such a spell. That's why powerful wizards never get lost. Now, I can't cast even _Cantrip_ right most of the time _,_ but I can read the paper copies they keep in the library, going back circa nine hundred years. They show leylines, places of anomalous magical power, and zones of interchange with other realms."

"Fairy circles?" I asked.

"The very same. Now, that well in the forest isn't even shown on recent maps. Supposedly it caved in a hundred years ago, but I have reason to believe that that was false. It's been several hundred years since a fairy circle was recorded around the well, though."

"People have even _known_ about this?"

"It would seem," he said. He sighed. "The well is at the intersection of two very faint leylines. Normally lines wouldn't have anything to do with a fairy circle; it's two different types of geomancy. However, the Fair Folk—" he paused to cross himself "—may be able to force an _artificial_ fairy circle to form around an object of magical power, such as a well somebody happened to build at the nexus of two leylines… or more likely a certain stone in that well, whichever one happened to fall exactly on the intersection."

"And people like to build things on leylines. It's subconscious, isn't it?" I asked.

He sat down on the edge of my hospital bed. "So the theory goes, and your friend Sue's studies of cattle-herding paths in the Near Wastes would seem to support that. She also claims birds migrate in patterns determined by the lines, which is harder to prove but no less likely, if you ask me."

"Oh, wow. I had no idea."

"Best geographer _and_ best geomancer here. Don't tell Howell I said that. Anyways, the whole area is roped off, but I don't know how long it'll stay that way. By the way, I heard that the… person quoted _Tam Lin_ at you. That, in my opinion, is damn worrying, as is the blotch on your scan—don't worry, I haven't blabbed about that."

"Yeah, everything that happens to me is worrying. I'm used to it."

"Yeah, Marcy, I still have to worry. Your fate is probably tied to the fate of this university in ways I can't understand. Your adoptive father was one of our founders, your real father tried to destroy the university, and these damn fairies seem to have marked _you_ in some way."

"Wait, _Simon_ was one of the founders?"

"Not just that, one of The Thirteen. They were some of the founders, the original deans, the original Knights, and the greatest champions of education of our age. Now only two survive, you know that? And if Charlie comes back and threatens what he built with them, I won't hesitate to make it only one, _manu mea_. But _cripes,_ I'm late! I'm subbing for Mungey again. Be very careful and remember that we're in a time of signs and portents. Good bye!"

He _ran_ out of the hospital room, looking at his pocket watch.

Then came Mungey, about an hour later.

"Hey," I said. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm too stoned to teach class, but I got some square filling in for me. _Mach dir keine Sorgen,_ dude,it's a square I trust. I was coming up here to get more weed from the pharmacist, but I saw your name on the door and had to stop by. Your absences are excused, and we'll talk about making up the last pop quiz, but, uh, you wouldn't happen to know why the chancellor moved me to an office full of bats and shit, would you? And who's the new chancellor, anyways?"

* * *

Finally, they're releasing me from the hospital. It's starting to get dark and I guess I'll walk back to campus. Honestly, I might try flying. I finally feel rested up. It actually looks great outside and the birds are singing.

So, I guess _ciao_ until tomorrow or whenever, Diary.

(Oh, shit, I'm not wearing pants.)


End file.
